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Biological resistance to pesticides, vaccines, antibiotics, and chemotherapies creates huge costs to society, including extensive morbidity and mortality. We simultaneously face costly resistance to social changes, such as those required to resolve human-wildlife conflicts and conserve biodiversity and the biosphere. Viewing resistance as a force that impedes change from one state to another, we suggest that an analysis of biological resistance can provide unique and potentially testable insights into understanding resistance to social changes. We review key insights from managing biological resistance and develop a framework that identifies seven strategies to overcome resistance. We apply this framework to consider how it might be used to understand social resistance and generate potentially novel hypotheses that may be useful to both enhance the development of strategies to manage resistance and modulate change in socio-ecological systems.

Cancer progression is an evolutionary process. During this process, evolving cancer cell populations encounter restrictive ecological niches within the body, such as the primary tumor, circulatory system, and diverse metastatic sites. Efforts to prevent or delay cancer evolution-and progression-require a deep understanding of the underlying molecular evolutionary processes. Herein we discuss a suite of concepts and tools from evolutionary and ecological theory that can inform cancer biology in new and meaningful ways. We also highlight current challenges to applying these concepts, and propose ways in which incorporating these concepts could identify new therapeutic modes and vulnerabilities in cancer.

Over thousands of years the brain has evolved. Our ability to change its structure is quite limited. What we can do is change the way we work with the brain and appeal to it. These notions are the building blocks for this paper. Three strands of intellectual work (neuroscience to include social intelligence, pedagogy, and environment/culture) are explored. Their relationship with each other is considered. The objective is to find a path with a higher probability of closing the fiercely persistent gender gap in educational performance especially for the performance of young men of color. Instruction informed by the gender findings emerging from neuroscience to include social intelligence is a path forward likely to produce better best practices and educational interventions. The environment/culture strand aligned with better best educational practices will produce an intervention that works thus yielding a performance pay off for boys and girls. New male schools along with new ways of working with the parents of those who populate these schools and new ways of engaging the community can produce enduring performance success. Educational interventions that work will aid in shrinking the persistent performance gap. This should insure that every child has a chance to wisely invest every day so that he or she can participate in the emerging flat world as an option.

Leadership resources are constantly adapting to the challenge of the dynamic and complex systems in which they must function. To understand the changing leadership types and to better guide the development of new leadership resources, we propose a two-dimensional leadership landscape that provides a perspective into past leadership resources and identifies new frontiers of leadership. In the Where-How of Leadership Emergence (WHOLE) Landscape, one dimension is where leadership occurs – ranging from a single individual to the entire collective – and the other is how leadership arises – ranging from predictable – being based on the structure of the system, to unpredictable – being opportunistic and/or emergent. For simplicity this landscape is divided into four quadrants; two of the quadrants are identified with traditional centralized leadership resources: 1) power- based, hierarchical and/or predictable leadership resources and 2) the opportunistic, unpredictable, and/or emergent hero or leader. We argue that the other two quadrants for distributed leadership are the frontiers of leadership. The structured and distributed quadrant encompasses both familiar collective leadership systems (e.g., direct democracies) and systems based on information technology (e.g., prediction markets). The emergent and distributed quadrant – emergent collective leadership (ECL) – is identified as the newest frontier and innovation in the most challenging dynamic and complex environments. A variety of issues with ECL are discussed: its validity as a resource, organizational conditions for its occurrence, individual and collective requirements for a functioning ECL process, and the embodiment of ECL solutions in organizational structures.