Prof Indrė Žliobaitė

The notion of evolution extends far beyond biological species. Languages change, music or fashion tastes continuously evolve, civilizations emerge, prosper and go extinct, economies rise and decline, financial or societal crises come and go. A big question of scientific and public curiosity is: to what extent evolutionary processes that underlie such dramatic transformations are alike across different domains? Do the same mechanisms operate across different time scales from financial crises spanning hours to mass extinctions spanning thousands of years? Do species, economies, languages, cultures age in the same way, and could their decline ever be predictable? In this talk I will discuss our ongoing research efforts to quantify patterns of rise and decline across six disciplines (palaeontology, microbiology, linguistics, musicology, economics and urban science) and compare them computationally.