Towards a physics of evolution: Existence of gales of creative deconstruction in evolving technological networks

Abstract

Systems evolving according to the standard concept of biological or technological evolution are often described by catalytic evolution equations. We study the structure of these equations and find a deep relationship to classical thermodynamics. In particular we can demonstrate the existence of several distinct phases of evolutionary dynamics: a phase of fast growing diversity, one of stationary, finite diversity, and one of rapidly decaying diversity. While the first two phases have been subject to previous work, here we focus on the destructive aspects - in particular the phase diagram - of evolutionary dynamics. We further propose a dynamical model of diversity which captures spontaneous creation and destruction processes fully respecting the phase diagrams of evolutionary systems. The emergent timeseries show a Zipf law in the diversity dynamics, which is e.g. observable in actual economical data, e.g. in firm bankruptcy data. We believe the present model is a way to cast the famous qualitative picture of Schumpeterian economic evolution, into a quantifiable and testable framework.