"That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics." (Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County Almanac", 1949)
"Biological communities are systems of interacting components and thus display characteristic properties of systems, such as mutual interdependence, self-regulation, adaptation to disturbances, approach to states of equilibrium, etc." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "Problems of Life", 1952)
"A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations. However, diversity is a strategic advantage only if there is a truly vibrant community, sustained by a web of relationships. If the community is fragmented into isolated groups and individuals, diversity can easily become a source of prejudice and friction. But if the community is aware of the interdependence of all its members, diversity will enrich all the relationships and thus enrich the community as a whole, as well as each individual member. In such a community information and ideas flow freely through the entire network, and the diversity of interpretations and learning styles-even the diversity of mistakes-will enrich the entire community." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)
"Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. It requires the shifts of perception that are characteristic of systems thinking - from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from contents to patterns. […] Nourishing the community means nourishing those relationships." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems", 1996)
"It [collective intelligence] is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I'll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities." (Pierre Levy, "Collective Intelligence", 1999)
"What is sustained in a sustainable community is not economic growth, development, market share, or competitive advantage, but the entire web of life on which our long-term survival depends. In other words, a sustainable community is designed in such a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life." (Fritjof Capra, "Ecoliteracy: The Challenge for Education in the Next Century", 1999)
"For any given population of susceptibles, there is some critical combination of contact frequency, infectivity, and disease duration just great enough for the positive loop to dominate the negative loops. That threshold is known as the tipping point. Below the tipping point, the system is stable: if the disease is introduced into the community, there may be a few new cases, but on average, people will recover faster than new cases are generated. Negative feedback dominates and the population is resistant to an epidemic. Past the tipping point, the positive loop dominates .The system is unstable and once a disease arrives, it can spread like wildfire that is, by positive feedback-limited only by the depletion of the susceptible population." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"If the contact rate, infectivity, and duration of infection are small enough, the system is below the tipping point and stable. Such a situation is known as herd immunity because the arrival of an infected individual does not produce an epidemic (though a few unlucky individuals may come in contact with any infectious arrivals and contract the disease, the group as a community is protected). However, changes in the contact rate, infectivity, or duration of illness can push a system past the tipping point." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"The living world can be viewed as a biological hierarchy that starts with subcellular particles, and continues up through cells, tissues and organs. Ecology deals with the next three levels: the individual organism, the population (consisting of individuals of the same species) and the community (consisting of a greater or lesser number of species populations). At the level of the organism, ecology deals with how individuals are affected by" (and how they affect) their environment. At the level of the population, ecology is concerned with the presence or absence of particular species, their abundance or rarity, and with the trends and fluctuations in their numbers. Community ecology then deals with the composition and organization of ecological communities." (Michael Begon et al, "Ecology: From individuals to ecosystems", 2006)
"The butterfly effect demonstrates that complex dynamical systems are highly responsive and interconnected webs of feedback loops. It reminds us that we live in a highly interconnected world. Thus our actions within an organization can lead to a range of unpredicted responses and unexpected outcomes. This seriously calls into doubt the wisdom of believing that a major organizational change intervention will necessarily achieve its pre-planned and highly desired outcomes. Small changes in the social, technological, political, ecological or economic conditions can have major implications over time for organizations, communities, societies and even nations." (Elizabeth McMillan, "Complexity, Management and the Dynamics of Change: Challenges for practice", 2008)
"As it turns out, complex networks are everywhere. Or, to be more precise, it turns out that if we model real-world situations in terms of networks, we often discover new things. What is striking, is that many real-world net- works look alike: the structure of the Internet resembles the organization of our brain, but also the organization of online social communities. Where these similarities come from is still a mystery, just as it is often very difficult to understand how certain networks were actually structured." (Maarten van Steen, "Graph Theory and Complex Networks: An Introduction", 2010)
"Political structures are excessively paternalistic, and to maintain them requires a high level of energy. The massive amounts of energy they consume are unsustainable and invite political meltdowns, bailouts, and fallout. On the other hand, proponents of complexity theory take the paradigm–shattering view that less is more. They understand that, paradoxically enough, the complexity of simplicity is the key to the emergence of systems, repeatable patterns and the social glue that holds community together and creates order. Anyone can make simplicity complicated; it takes a true genius to make the complicated simple." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos", 2013)
"These nature-inspired algorithms gradually became more and more attractive and popular among the evolutionary computation research community, and together they were named swarm intelligence, which became the little brother of the major four evolutionary computation algorithms." (Yuhui Shi, "Emerging Research on Swarm Intelligence and Algorithm Optimization", Information Science Reference, 2014)
"The concept of temporal graphs is useful in all the real-world problems that can be represented as a graph, where the nodes and edges of the graph may change over time. For example, temporal graphs are extensively applied in modeling social networks. By capturing the evolving relationships between individuals, temporal graphs enable a more accurate representation of social dynamics. This is particularly useful for predicting changes in friendships, community structures, and the information diffusion over time." (Aldo Marzullo et al, "Graph Machine Learning" 2nd Ed., 2025)
