Cascades of failure and extinction in dynamically evolving complex systems

摘要

There is a rapidly growing literature on cascades in networks whose topology is fixed. This paper considers networks whose topology evolves over time. It extends the concept of 'robust yet fragile' to evolving networks. Such networks can be robust in the sense that the average fitness of the system rises over time. But they are also fragile: the proportion of extinction events which are very large increases.