For those interested by this topic (as I am), here is the address of the NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02evo.html. For more information, hereafter are some links towards some of the leaders of this movement that tends to bring together cultural and natural evolution:

• Professor Kevin Laland, University of St Andrews, Scotland.
• Professor Robert Boyd, University of California, Los Angeles.
• Professor Peter Richerson, University of California, Davis.
• Professor Mark Stoneking, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany.

Hereafter is the summary of this book:

One of the greatest discoveries of recent times is that the complex patterns we find in life are often produced when all of the individuals in a group follow the same simple rule. This process of “self-organization” reveals itself in the inanimate worlds of crystals and seashells, but as Len Fisher shows, it is also evident in living organisms, from fish to ants to human beings. The coordinated movements of fish in shoals, for example, arise from the simple rule: “Follow the fish in front.” Traffic flow arises from simple rules: “Keep your distance” and “Keep to the right.”

Now, in his new book, Fisher shows how we can manage our complex social lives in an ever more chaotic world. His investigation encompasses topics ranging from “swarm intelligence” to the science of parties and the best ways to start a fad. Finally, Fisher sheds light on the beauty and utility of complexity theory. An entertaining journey into the science of everyday life, The Perfect Swarm will delight anyone who wants to understand the complex situations in which we so often find ourselves.

Review in nature can be found here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7285/full/464035a.html.

Review in Scientific American Mind can be found here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mind-reviews-the-perfect-swarm.

Position: Computer Scientist in Spatial Analysis and Data Integration
Location: IRD Reunion Island, France
Duration: 17 months from June 2010 to December 2011
Deadline: 31st of May 2010
Salary Range: ~ 3000€ by month

IRD (Institute for Reasearch and Development) is seeking for a young scientific researcher (PhD) with strong quantitative analytical skills and good knowledge in spatial analyses including experience in data modelling (developed mathematical approaches by stochastic differential equations or individual-based models) and programming (R, Splus, C++ or Matlab). You should possess good interactive web development skills to manage databases using JavaScript (AJAX) and PHP/Python in an Apache/Linux environment. Knowledge in marine biology and telemetry are suitable. You will work on electronic tagging data coming from experiments dedicated to the understanding of gregarious fish behaviours under FADs (Fish Aggregating Device). Spatial data with high resolution acquired by different telemetry methods are already available. You will contribute to purchase and consolidate the analyses by confront field data to model outputs. You should have to participate to tagging experiment in the open-field. You need good verbal and written presentation and communication skills in English, good working knowledge of Word and Excel and databases and proven ability to work as part of an interdisciplinary team.

For additional information and proposal, please contact:
Dr M. Soria, Research engineer
Tel: 00 262 (0) 262 29 93 42
Email: marc.soria@ird.fr

In the heart of Africa's savannah lies a city that is a model of sustainable development. Its buttressed towers are built entirely from natural, biodegradable materials. Its inhabitants live and work in quarters that are air-conditioned and humidity-regulated, without consuming a single watt of electricity. Water comes from wells that dip deep into the earth, and food is cultivated self-sufficiently in gardens within its walls. This metropolis is not just eco-friendly: with its curved walls and graceful arches, it is rather beautiful too.

This is no human city, of course. It is a termite mound.

To read the rest of this article, click here: For sustainable architecture, think bug – life – 22 February 2010 – New Scientist.

Call for papers is available here along with a summary of the objectives of this workshop. In short, 

This half-day workshop aims to bring together new theories and methodologies inspired by biological principles for self-organizing robotic systems. The emphasis of the workshop is on bridging multi-disciplinary research areas such as robotics, artificial life, systems biology, and evolutionary computation. Topics of this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Morphogenetic approaches to self-organizing multi-robot systems
• Morphogenetic approaches to modular robots
• Evolutionary and developmental approaches to design of robot body-plan and controller
• Self-organized multi-robot pattern formation and boundary coverage
• Stigmergy in self-organized collective construction
• Swarm intelligence based approaches to multi-robot systems
• Unified approaches to self-assembling swarm and modular robots
• Evolutionary multi-robot organism
• Robustness, self-reparability and evolvability of self-organizing multi-robot systems

Important dates to remember are:

• Submission deadline: February 25, 2010
• Author notification: March 6, 2010
• Final version due: March 12, 2010
• Workshop: May 3, 2010

By the way, I'm giving a talk there. 

The first day of the meeting is a postgraduate workshop with short talks by invited speakers, focusing on topics of great interest for researchers in the early stages of their career. The second and third days are the Easter meeting. There will be post graduate talks, poster presentations, social events, and plenary lectures by Prof. Jane Hurst and Prof. Jens Krause as well as the presentation by Dr Andy Gardner, the 2010 winner of the ASAB Outstanding Young Investigator Award.

All information can be found at the following address: http://psychology.exeter.ac.uk/asabeaster2010/ASAB%20Easter%20Meeting%202010.html. 

Important dates for this event are:

• Deadline for abstract submission: February 28, 2010
• Registration closes: March 10, 2010

Swarm Cognition is the juxtaposition of two relatively unrelated concepts that evoke, on the one hand, the power of collective behaviours displayed by natural swarms, and on the other hand the complexity of cognitive processes in the vertebrate brain. In recent years, scientists from various disciplines have been suggesting that, at a certain level of description, operational principles used to account for the behaviour of natural swarms may turn out to be extremely powerful tools to identify the neuroscientic basis of cognition. Generally speaking, these studies claim that the massively parallel animal-to-animal interactions which operationally explain cognitive processes of natural swarms are functionally similar to neuron-to-neuron communication which underlie the cognitive abilities of living organisms, including humans. With this premise, research work in Swarm Cognition aims at identifying the operational principles of cognitive behaviour by calling upon the underlying mechanisms of self-organising systems, i.e., systems whose internal organisation changes without being guided by an outside source.

We encourage submissions of innovative research work which highlights the importance of the mechanisms of self-organisation as operational principles to explain cognitive processes displayed by individuals or collectives, both natural and artificial. Particularly welcome are contributions focusing on the distributed mechanisms underlying cognitive processes, like, for instance, decision-making, attention, learning or memory.
Topics of interest in relationship to the above issues include but are not limited to:

• Cognitive and computational neurosciences
• Cognitive and social ethology
• Swarm intelligence and swarm robotics
• Adaptive control
• Systems biology
• Neural computation and distributed representations
• Cultural evolution and Learning
• Cognitive sociology
• Bounded rationality

Important dates for this special issue are: 

• Manuscript due: March 15, 2010
• Notication: May 31, 2010
• Final manuscript due: July 19, 2010

Launching expected for next February, I can't wait to see what and who hides behind this.