Wojciech Borkowski

The Evolutionary Basis of Honor Cultures

Around the globe, people fight for their honor, even if it means sacrificing their lives. This is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective, and little is known about the conditions under which honor cultures evolve. We implemented an agent-based model of honor, and our simulations showed that the reliability of institutions and toughness of the environment are crucial conditions for the evolution of honor cultures. Honor cultures survive when the effectiveness of the authorities is low, even in very tough environments. Moreover, the results show that honor cultures and aggressive cultures are mutually dependent in what resembles a predator-prey relationship described in the renowned Lotka-Volterra model. Both cultures are eliminated when institutions are reliable. These results have implications for understanding conflict throughout the world, where Western-based strategies are exported, often unsuccessfully, to contexts of weak institutional authority wherein honor-based strategies have been critical for survival.

Rough sets in floristic description of the inner-city of Warsaw

Summary This paper reports an application of rough set theory to floristic description of downtown Warsaw. The original Warsaw - flora dataset consisting of 1181 attributes (presence/absence of vascular plant taxa in 225 grid squares) has been reduced to an 8-attribute subset enabling a minimal discriminant description of the inner-city (Table 1). The distribution of Diplotaxis muralis (Fig. 1) has been recognized as the attribute whose discriminating power is the highest (Table 2). This conforms to an earlier chisquare-based approach. Three taxa out of eight included in the best subset, Diplotaxis muralis, Humulus lupulus and Malva neglecta , had been considered by other authors as good indicator plants for certain urban biotopes. An identification tree extracted from the reduced dataset has been presented (Fig. 2). The tree can be regarded as the shortest (i.e., involving minimum number of species) floristic characteristic of the downtown. Rough sets approach has been found promising and complementary to both experts informal appraisal and statistical methods. This makes it possible to obtain the minimum knowledge representation and enables the extraction of useful rules from the data. Conceivable drawbacks include local character of the identification rules and their susceptibility to small changes in floristic composition. We conclude that fuzzy rough sets and rough fuzzy sets provide an especially interesting framework for geobotanical analyses. They combine coarseness of rough sets with imprecision of fuzzy approach, which would presumably eliminate the shortcomings encountered.

Dynamics of Socio-Economic systems: attractors, rationality and meaning

Gintis Helbing and go beyond the traditional boundaries of scientific disciplines and offer the integration of major theories of the main disciplines of the social and natural sciences. The theory captures many ideas of social psychology. Several assumptions of the model, however, can be questioned. The hypothesis that social systems are at equilibrium is too narrow, because social systems can also be out of balance. The concept of dynamic attraction shows that the systems may converge to different types of attractors in accordance with the value of control parameters. The notion of rationality of human behavior can be challenged on the basis of new data of psychology, decision sciences and behavioral economics. Often individuals do not process information, but rather copy the choices of others. Individuals interact by both direct and indirect means – if market mechanisms. More importantly, the social dynamic, unlike physical systems, are governed by a sense. Despite these limitations of the theory and Gintis Helbing is an important step in the integration of social sciences.

Modeling Dynamics of Multicultural Integration and Conflict

A series of computer simulations explored a formalized theoretical model of multicultural integration which concentrates on attitudes towards ingroup and outgroup as main variables. The simulations were aimed at the investigation of social dynamics underlying the evolution of patterns of integration and segregation. The findings suggest that: integration is possible only with strong mutually positive attitudes; negative attitudes lead to segregation even if one group would be positive; surprisingly tolerance – a neutral stance also leads to segregation. These results are discussed in the light of conflict and multiculturalism.