V. Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An EarthWinian Genesis Synthesis

5. Cooperative Member/Group Societies

Rasskin-Gutman, Diego and Borja Esteve-Altava. Connecting the Dots: Anatomical Network Analysis in Morphological EvoDevo. Biological Theory. Online April, 2014. Along with Ralf Kurvers, Octavio Miramontes, Chris Knight, et al, University of Valencia, Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, researchers contribute a latest report on how life’s evolutionary phylogeny and developmental ontogeny is more influenced by an intrinsic, relational sociality than internal conflicts. This view is set within a deep history from Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire’s 19th century “Le Principe de Connexions” to a 20th century “disconnect from connectivity” and just now being revived and verified by the latest complexity sciences of a natural self-organization. As a specific case, the independent network propensities are seen in structural effect for many manners of skeletal and cranial forms. See also “Network Models in Anatomical Systems” by the authors and colleagues in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences (JAS, 175/89, 2011).

Morphological EvoDevo is a field of biological inquiry in which explicit relations between evolutionary patterns and growth or morphogenetic processes are made. Historically, morphological EvoDevo results from the coming together of several traditions, notably Naturphilosophie, embryology, the study of heterochrony, and developmental constraints. A special feature binding different approaches to morphological EvoDevo is the use of formalisms and mathematical models. Here we will introduce anatomical network analysis, a new approach centered on connectivity patterns formed by anatomical parts, with its own concepts and tools specifically designed for the study of morphological EvoDevo questions. Riedl’s concept of burden is tightly related to the use of anatomical networks, providing a nexus between the evolutionary patterns and the structural constraints that shape them. (Abstract)

Network theory has been extensively used to model the underlying structure of biological processes. From genetics to ecology, network thinking is changing our understanding of complex systems, specifically how their internal structure determines their overall behavior. Concepts such as hubs, scale-free or small-world networks, common in the complexity literature, are now used more and more in sociology, neurosciences, as well as other anthropological fields. Even though the use of network models is nowadays so widely applied, few attempts have been carried out to enrich our understanding in the classical morphological sciences such as in comparative anatomy or physical anthropology. The purpose of this article is to introduce the usage of network tools in morphology; specifically by building anatomical networks, dealing with the most common analyses and problems, and interpreting their outcome. (JAS Abstract)

Reeve, H. Kern and Bern Holldobler. The Emergence of a Superorganism Through Intergroup Competition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104/9736, 2007. Insect societies aid their survival by a superorganic stage by way of a complementarity of intra-and inter- group conflict and cooperation.

Reina, Andreagiovanni, et al. Psychophysical Laws and the Superorganism. Nature Scientific Reports. 8/4387, 2018. Reported more in Universality Affirmations, here University of Sheffield and ISTC, Italian National Research Council computational psychologists discern a consistence recurrence in kind across a wide array of creaturely phyla. Furthermore, a similar correspondence holds for both somatic physiologies and cerebral functions. By these lights, a common evolutionary track of individual organisms into viable communal forms becomes evident, as enhanced by intelligent capacities. See also Collective Decision Making by this group in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences (Thomas Bose, et al, 16/30, 2017).

Reuter, Hauke. Community Processes as Emergent Properties: Modelling Multilevel Interaction in Small Mammals Communities. Ecological Modelling. 186/4, 2005. This work can be seen as a microcosm, along with similar studies across nature’s nested expanse, which exhibits the recurrence of a universal creative, complementary system.

The presented individual-based model for the first time described small rodent communities as a set of interacting autonomously acting agents with a detailed life history and behavioral repertoire in a food-web setup composed of three tropic levels (rodents, …food and predators). Due to the representation with interacting entities, the dynamics on higher levels resulted in a self-organization process as emergent properties. (427)

Ridley, Matt. The Origins of Virtue. New York: Viking, 1996. An essay on how evolutionary biology can support and favor cooperation in a nested, “Russian doll” scale from genetic “teams” or networks to primate and human societies.

Rosenthal, Sara, et al. Revealing the Hidden Networks of Interaction in Mobile Animal Groups Allows Prediction of Complex Behavioral Contagion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112/4690, 2015. As the Abstract relates, Princeton University evolutionary ecologists including Iain Couzin quantify the presence of constant individual and communal activities and responses which can then be traced to neural phenomena. The vital benefit of a dynamic social reciprocity between members and group is an enhanced survival viability. Another notice to record is how individual liberty and variance can yet serve and be absorbed in a self-organized coherence.

Coordination among social animals requires rapid and efficient transfer of information among individuals, which may depend crucially on the underlying structure of the communication network. Establishing the decision-making circuits and networks that give rise to individual behavior has been a central goal of neuroscience. However, the analogous problem of determining the structure of the communication network among organisms that gives rise to coordinated collective behavior, such as is exhibited by schooling fish and flocking birds, has remained almost entirely neglected. Here, we study collective evasion maneuvers, manifested through rapid waves, or cascades, of behavioral change (a ubiquitous behavior among taxa) in schooling fish. We find that individuals use simple, robust measures to assess behavioral changes in neighbors, and that the resulting networks by which behavior propagates throughout groups are complex, being weighted, directed, and heterogeneous. Furthermore, we demonstrate that we can predict complex cascades of behavioral change at their moment of initiation, before they actually occur. Consequently, despite the intrinsic stochasticity of individual behavior, establishing the hidden communication networks in large self-organized groups facilitates a quantitative understanding of behavioral contagion. (Abstract)

Roughgarden, Joan. The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. The Stanford University biologist and gender activist further makes the case for an overdue correction to the distorted male evolutionary theory (and of everything else from religion to politics one may add) that admits only competition while excluding common propensities for mutual aid. The publisher’s website provides a good summary.

Are selfishness and individuality—rather than kindness and cooperation—basic to biological nature? Does a "selfish gene" create universal sexual conflict? In The Genial Gene, Joan Roughgarden forcefully rejects these and other ideas that have come to dominate the study of animal evolution. Building on her brilliant and innovative book Evolution's Rainbow, in which she challenged accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation, Roughgarden upends the notion of the selfish gene and the theory of sexual selection and develops a compelling and controversial alternative theory called social selection. This scientifically rigorous, model-based challenge to an important tenet of neo-Darwinian theory emphasizes cooperation, elucidates the factors that contribute to evolutionary success in a gene pool or animal social system, and vigorously demonstrates that to identify Darwinism with selfishness and individuality misrepresents the facts of life as we now know them.

Sachs, Joel, et al. The Evolution of Cooperation. Quarterly Review of Biology. 79/2, 2004. Presently a number of disparate theories are in contention to explain cooperative behavior in animal societies. The authors attempt a resolution by proposing a hierarchical model founded on three tenets: directed reciprocation – cooperation that returns benefits, shared genes – altruism with kin, and byproduct benefits – cooperation that involves or surmounts selfish actions by members. A detailed argument is presented in their defense.

Santos, Francisco, et al. The Role of Diversity in the Evolution of Cooperation. Journal of Theoretical Biology. Online September, 2011. With co-authors Flávio Pinheiro, Tom Lenaerts, and Jorge Pacheco, Portuguese and Belgian systems scientists help quantify an evolutionary propensity for organisms at every scalar stage to join their diverse labors within mutually beneficial groupings. By these findings, may it dawn how universally prevalent is such an individual and communal complementarity, as a natural wisdom that can be availed for sustainable human societies?

Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms that promote and maintain cooperative behavior is recognized as a major theoretical problem where the intricacy increases with the complexity of the participating individuals. This is epitomized by the diverse nature of Human interactions, contexts, preferences and social structures. Here we discuss how social diversity, in several of its flavors, catalyzes cooperative behavior. From the diversity in the number of interactions an individual is involved to differences in the choice of role models and contributions, diversity is shown to significantly increase the chances of cooperation. Individual diversity leads to an overall population dynamics in which the underlying dilemma of cooperation is changed, benefiting the society as whole. In addition, we show how diversity in social contexts can arise from the individual capacity for organizing their social ties. As such, Human diversity, on a grand scale, may be instrumental in shaping us as the most sophisticated cooperative entities on this planet. (Abstract)

Sapolsky, Robert. Social Cultures among Nonhuman Primates. Current Anthropology. 47/4, 2006. A peer-reviewed article by the Stanford University primatologist which discusses how to appreciate the presence of true cultural behaviors, specifically here in a troop of baboons.

Sapolsky, Robert and Lisa Share. A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission. www.plosbiology.org. An article published on the Public Library of Science website and accompanied there by a peer commentary, Peace Lessons from an Unlikely Source, by the primatologist Franz de Waal. Also reported in the Science Section of the New York Times for April 12, 2004, it relates a remarkable adjustment in a baboon troop, typically beset by male aggression, if its dominant males become sick and die. In their absence, a more peaceful culture based on conciliation and grooming arose and has remained since. These reports comment that human society ought to appreciate it is not frozen into cycles of male violence but can intentionally choose to become much more civil.

Sar, Gourab Kumar and Dibakar Ghosh.. Flocking and swarming in a multi-agent dynamical system.. arXiv:2312.06383. Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata physicists write an innovative theoretic and empirical paper in honour of 70th birthday of Prof. Juergen Kurths, shich is to appear in the journal Chaos. Yheir contribution is a novel synthesis of flock (birds) and swarm (insects) behaviors.

For some years now, the research community has studied multi-agent systems and which are abound in nature as bacterial colonies, fish schools, bird flocks, and as microswimmers and robotics. Flocking and swarming are key components of the collective behaviours of multi-agent systems. In flocking, the agents coordinate their motion, but in swarming, they congregate to organise their spatial position. We cite a mathematical model of locally interacting multi-agent system where the agents both swarm in space and exhibit group dynamics. (Abstract)

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