Report for the academic year - Libraries - Institute for Advanced Study

Institute for advanced study
Nowak is working n a mathematical theory for the evolution and population dynamics
nt human language. With Joshua Plotkin and Vincent Jansen (University of London), he
studied the conditions for the evolution of syntactic communication. With Natalia
Komarova and Partha Niyogi (University of Chicago), he formulated a theory for the evolution
"t universal grammar. This work specifies the constraints that universal grammar
has to impose for a population to evolve and maintain a coherent grammatical system.
Nowak currently works on a similar framework tor the acquisition of the lexical matrix.
Peter Trapa and Martin Nowak performed a Nash-equilibrium analysis of lexical matrices.
Nowak is interested in the evolutionary dynamics of the Ultimatum Game. In recent
years, there has been tremendous interest among economists and psychologists in a very
puzzling, experimental observation: when humans are asked to split a certain amount of
money, according to the rules of the Ultimatum Game, they discard the rational solution
in favor of fairness. Nowak, together with Karen Page and Karl Sigmund (Vienna),
developed an evolutionary approach to the Ultimatum Game. A key observation was
that fairness out-competes reason if there is some possibility that individuals can obtain
information on outcomes of previous interactions.
Walter Fontana's research explores how self-sustaining chemical systems emerge and how
to develop a formal method to classify their possible changes. His work goes beyond Dar-
winian selection, which may explain which of two alternative molecular systems will
come to dominate an environment under certain conditions but cannot explain how
these alternatives originated in the first place nor offer a complete spectrum of what else
could have been possible. While at the Institute, Fontana focused on three areas: geno-
typ phenotype relations and evolutionary dynamics, evolutionary RNA games and mol-
ecular signal transduction.
David Krakauer works on the evolution of prion proteins and related autocatalytie poly-
mers, selection acting on signal transduction networks, stability properties of parasite
genomes, and the evolution of sign systems. Each of these problems is characterized by
the need to encode heritable information at distinct levels of biological organization,
where selection pressures are often independent or in conflict. He has made progress in
modeling the dynamics of infection of the nervous system, demonstrating the influence
of neural topology on disease propagation, and has investigated viral genome stability in
the presence ol defective interfering particles, and cellular computation in the GNRH-
receptor signal transduction pathways. He was given a visiting assistant professorship at
the Department oi Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and made
a consultant to the Program on Robustness at the Santa Fe Institute, lie continues to
work with his experimental collaborators, Professor Lynn Enquist and Dr. Stuart Sealfon.
Alun Lloyd joined the biology program in fall 1999. Before arriving at the Institute, he was
Medical Research Council Postdoctoral Research bellow, working in the Mathematical
Bi( x\ research group in the Department of Zoology of the I Iniversity of Oxford and a lec-
turer at St. 1 1 1 Ida's I follege, where he taught statistics. One of Lloyd's current projects is an
investigation of stochasticit) and heterogeneities in transmission on the dynamics of childhi
M id diseases In parlk iil.tr. he is working on using recently developed mathematical mod-
els to develop and inform control strategies lor such diseases as measles. He also works on
the within host dynamics ol \ iral diseases, sm h as HIV.
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