Who replaces whom? Local versus non-local replacement in social and evolutionary dynamics

In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models, interacting individuals, while participating in self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complexe behaviors and patterns. While one main focus in population genetics is on the adaptive behavior of a population, social dynamics is more often concerned with the splitting of a connected array of individuals into a state of global polarization, that is, the emergence of speciation. Applying computational and mathematical tools we show that the way the mechanisms of selection, interaction and replacement are constrained and combined in the modelling have an inportant bearing on both adaptation and the emergence of specification. Differently (un)constraining the mechanism of individual replacement provides the conditions required for either speciation or adaptation, since these features appear as two opposing phenomena, not achieved by one and the same model. Even though natural selection, operating as an external, environmental mechanism, is neither necessary nor sufficient for the creation of speciation, our modelling exercises highlight the important role played by natural selection in the interplay of the evolutionary and the self-organization modeling methodologies.