Dresden 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 7: Award Session: Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics (YSA)

SOE 7.1: Topical Talk

Dienstag, 10. März 2026, 14:00–14:30, GÖR/0226

What's that noise? Why does it make a difference? And why am I thinking about it all the time? — •Dirk Brockmann — Center Synergy of Systems, TU-Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Replication is one of the central processes in biological, ecological, evolutionary and, in more subtle ways, also social systems. Unsurprisingly, many dynamical systems designed to describe such phenomena implement replication in one form or another. Some are even labeled as such, for example the replicator equation, a keystone system whose many variants populate ecological and evolutionary modelling with admirable persistence. Despite their conceptual simplicity, replicator systems have a habit of producing surprises and sit at the center of long-standing controversies. One of these is an apparent paradox: the competitive exclusion principle, often a generic hallmark of replicator dynamics, seems fundamentally at odds with the remarkable diversity of species with very similar ecological functions observed in real ecosystems. Nature, it appears, did not read the textbook. Fluctuating environments and, more generally, noise have been proposed as a way out of this dilemma. Yet models that include noise tend to disagree with one another, leaving the puzzle very much alive. In this lecture, I will discuss how noise can affect replication in qualitatively different ways, why it matters which noise you add and how, how this may help us understand coexistence in ecosystems, and why thinking about all this may quietly reshape how we understand cooperation as a pervasive feature of the biosphere.

Keywords: replication; coexistence; cooperation; noise; more noise