Universal Diversity Patterns Across the Sciences

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Organizers: Jeffrey C. Nekola; University of New Mexico; jnekola@unm.edu John Harte; University of California – Berkeley; jharte@berkeley.edu David Storch; Charles University; storch@cts.cuni.cz

Summary: Several intensively studied ecological diversity patterns appear to have almost exact analogues across a wide range of disciplines including physics, economics, linguistics, sociology and the geosciences. As a result, the ultimate mechanisms underlying them would seem to be more general than those typically offered or considered by disciplinary researchers. The aim of this workshop is to initiate an interdisciplinary collaborative investigation which will: (1) evaluate the regularity of apparently universal diversity patterns across multiple disciplines, (2) explore their mutual connections (3) conduct tests to show which of these patterns can be considered to be non-superficially regular, (4) explore these regularities via a set of candidate explanative frameworks (e.g. statistical constraints, system self-organization, maximum entropy, random branching processes and fractality), and (5) explore possible links between these frameworks. This investigation will assist documentation of important commonalities between disciplines, and will help focus attention on those unified processes that generate diversity across the physical, biological, and socio-cultural world.

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