The article, by James Witts and fantastic illustration by David MacMillan, is called "The Cycling Theory of Everything", and features discussions I had with James Witts, primarily in relation to a conference paper I presented in 2011 called "Information Flow and the Distinction Between Self-Organized and Top-down Dynamics in Bicycle Pelotons". It also touches on some more recent published papers by me and co-authors, and other published papers that involve peloton dynamics.
Here is the first page of the article. Since the full article is not available online by open access, I won't include the entire article here.
This was a great opportunity to present a "conversational" overview of some of my work and, with any luck, may bring some publicity to this developing area of research.
There are a couple of things I wanted to clarify at this stage for starters. I may expand on certain points in later posts. This isn't meant to be a critisicm of James Witts' excellent article, which must be read in the spirit intended: a laypersons introduction to some theoretical applications of peloton dynamics. Instead, I want to take the opportunity just to clarify and expand on some things referred to in the article.
First, I want to clarify my own current place of professional employment. The article says that I work as a branch advocate for the liquor and cannabis industries in British Columbia. This is not quite right. In fact I am employed by the government (the Province) of British Columbia as "Branch Advocate" for the Liquor and Cannabis Regulation Branch in which my role is to represent the Branch at liquor enforcement hearings. Our branch of government is regulatory and I am involved at the compliance and enforcement end of things -- rather the opposite of what's implied by the article reference. James Witts can be forgiven for this error, though, since my job title and line of work is rather unusual, and easy to confuse with something else altogether.
With that out of the way, now a couple of things to say about the nature of my own research.
Importantly, I want to clarify that I make no claims that my research represents a theory of evolution that is somehow in competition with standard Darwinian evolution. The article could be misread to imply that I'm presenting some sort of new competing theory of evolution. I want to be clear that I'm talking about an evolutionary mechanism. This is quite different from trying to establish an entirely new theory that replaces long-established evolutionary theory.
Also, the article states "The key factor in cycling - and evolutionary biology, as it happens -- is that energy saving element". I don't actually claim that energy saving is key to evolutionary biology. I would claim that energy saving and optimization is important for evolutionary processes, but I don't claim that it dominates other well-understood processes like random mutation and natural selection.
Essentially, our research ("our" because I have a number of co-authors) is about sorting processes within collections of organisms. Broadly speaking, our research addresses questions about certain migratory processes and why some organisms have evolved to be within certain narrow size ranges. This is the "variation-range" hypothesis I've referred to in the article. This simply posits a correlation between any energy-saving quantity exhibited within biological collectives, and the size-range of the individuals in the collective; see: http://www.matjazperc.com/publications/BioSystems_147_40.pdf
Also, I think it's important to clarify a point in relation to this part of the article:
" "If I can extract some of the top-down strategic behavior...can I observe these macro-structures to enhance our understanding of evolutionary biology?" " It might seem some leap, but Trenchard believes he -- or at least someone could. And here's why_"A very important part of our research to date is that by using computer simulations, we have in fact extracted those top-down elements and have been able to show quite nicely that certain self-organized peloton dynamics do emerge in the absence of top-down factors. For this we can start with a basic flocking algorithm, and then introduce into computer simulations the three main factors the article mentions: a pacesetter speed; maximal sustainable outputs of riders across a heterogeneous range, and an energy-saving quantity. This we have done:
http://www.matjazperc.com/publications/PhysicaA_405_92.pdf
http://www.matjazperc.com/publications/ApplMathComput_251_24.pdf
It is precisely because we can extract those factors that we can assert analogous behaviors in other non-human biological systems. For this reason, my 2011 paper "Information Flow and the Distinction Between Self-Organized and Top-down Dynamics in Bicycle Pelotons" represents a theoretical starting point from which we have already moved well beyond.
I'll leave it there for now and reiterate my deep gratitude to James Witts for writing this excellent article, and James Spender, an editor with Cyclist Magazine, for this fantastic opportunity to showcase our research into peloton dynamics. As I say, with any luck, this great article will help to inspire discussion and further research into these dynamics.
In a later post, I may speak a bit more about criticisms I have of the Blocken paper, referred to in James Witts' article, and the paper by Tadd Truscott, also referred to.
