Search results for "Survival of the fittest"
showing 9 items of 9 documents
Disintegration of Italian rural landscapes to international environmental agreements
2015
In Italy, the first law that puts landscape and historical buildings under public control was implemented in 1922. While this represents a significant achievement for those times, for that law landscape essentially has an historical and aesthetic connotation, without any explicit reference to the components of flora, fauna and geology. Today, many protection policies and initiatives are still biased by the lack of reference to the intrinsic value that biodiversity and ecosystem services have for the maintenance of traditional landscapes, as well as for the survival of the human species. The priority accorded to historical and aesthetic values can lead to a lack of attention to the complex r…
Evolution of resource allocation between growth and reproduction in animals with indeterminate growth
1999
We review the recent theoretical developments explaining the evolution of age-schedules of reproduction in animals with indeterminate growth. Indeterminate growth, i.e. growth that continues past maturation and may continue until the end of life, is characteristic for a large number of invertebrate taxa (e.g. clams, cladocerans and crayfish) and ‘lower’ vertebrate taxa (e.g. fish, amphibians, lizards and snakes). Many plants also exhibit indeterminate growth, and we liberally include studies focused on plants when they can be interpreted in terms of animal life histories. We focus on different measures used to determine the fittest life histories, on indeterminate growth as a problem of res…
Science and art from a transevolutionary perspective
2018
From its origins, the human species has manipulated not only the real world but also the figurative one. While that manipulative action of the human species over both worlds was critical for the survival of the species in the beginning of its evolution -now transevolution-, it is also true that in the subsequent culture those worlds have been approached by two trades with highly different conceptual bases, science and art. In this paper I hold the thesis that both trades are necessary to know how to be in the world as well as how to transform it in an appropriate way.
Internationalization via strategic alliances in family businesses.
2004
It has been observed in previous studies that certain characteristics of family businesses may impede internationalization. These characteristics include the concentration of decision-making in the hands of a single shareholder or small group of shareholders, delays in the succession process, aversion to internationalization, etc. Despite these obstacles, a large number of family businesses have chosen to internationalize as a means of revitalizing themselves. The results of the study reported here indicate three important pre-requisites for family businesses that are seriously considering internationalization as an aid to growth: they need to have a market-leading product, adequate financi…
Embedding Evolution in Epidemic-Style Forwarding
2007
International audience; In this work, we introduce a framework to let forwarding schemes evolve in order to adapt to changing and a priori unknown environments. The framework is inspired by genetic algorithms: at each node a genotype describes the forwarding scheme used, a selection process fosters the diffusion of the fittest genotypes in the system and new genotypes are created by combining existing ones or applying random changes. A case study implementation is presented and its performance evaluated via numerical simulations.
Keys to the Survival of the Family Firm
2020
The purpose of this research is to carry out an in-depth exploration of the causes of the family firm's success over short and long term, analysing which capabilities are the most valuable sources of sustainable competitive advantage in every time horizon. The results confirm only functional capabilities have a positive and significant effect on short-term economic performance, whereas dynamic capabilities are the only ones that have a positive and significant impact on long-term economic performance.
Tra Sicilia e America: gli “scappati” di Cosa Nostra,
2009
Territorial control is one of the most important elements for the survival of the mafia. It is an obligated path to be able to obtain and control economic activities and to penetrate into all profitable sectors. Without territorial control it is impossible to control voters and without it all relationships with politics wither and die. It is within the territory where the imposition of "pizzo" (protection money) and extortion are planned against businesses and firms. This impending presence is also the cause in which citizens and families find themselves submitted to violence, the abuse of power and, if not only, to a limitation to their sphere of action. Telling the story about the scappat…
Size and survival of the hospitality industry: The case of Spain
2020
The aim of this study is to analyse the determinants of survival of the hospitality industry. The study pays particular attention to the size of the enterprises since the majority of Spanish hospitality enterprises are microenterprises. Two approaches are considered. The first approach uses a binary choice model to analyse the determinants of survival probability as well as the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition, proposed by Yun (2004), to quantify the difference between enterprises according to their size and what proportion of this difference is due to observed factors or unobserved factors. The second approach is a survival analysis, carried out through the Cox proportional hazard model, whic…
A Primer on Memetic Algorithms
2012
Memetic Algorithms (MAs) are population-based metaheuristics composed of an evolutionary framework and a set of local search algorithms which are activated within the generation cycle of the external framework, see [376]. The earliest MA implementation has been given in [621] in the context of the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) while an early systematic definition has been presented in [615]. The concept of meme is borrowed from philosophy and is intended as the unit of cultural transmission. In other words, complex ideas can be decomposed into memes which propagate andmutate within a population.Culture, in this way, constantly undergoes evolution and tends towards progressive improvemen…