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

5. Cooperative Member/Group Societies

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)

Sasaki, Takao and Dora Biro. Cumulative Culture can Emerge from Collective Intelligence in Animal Groups. Nature Communications. 8/15049, 2017. As studies of creature behavioral interactions grow in sophistication, Oxford University avian social zoologists quantify how bird flocks attain a working common knowledge as a vital resource. As researchers find similar instances for herds, pods, clans, and troops, through life’s emergent evolution, we really ought to expect and seek the same salutary faculty for our local and global repositories such as the worldwide Internet.

Studies of collective intelligence in animal groups typically overlook potential improvement through learning. Although knowledge accumulation is recognized as a major advantage of group living within the framework of Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE), the interplay between CCE and collective intelligence has remained unexplored. Here, we use homing pigeons to investigate whether the repeated removal and replacement of individuals in experimental groups (a key method in testing for CCE) alters the groups’ solution efficiency over successive generations. Homing performance improves continuously over generations, and later-generation groups eventually outperform both solo individuals and fixed-membership groups. Homing routes are more similar in consecutive generations within the same chains than between chains, indicating cross-generational knowledge transfer. Our findings thus show that collective intelligence in animal groups can accumulate progressive modifications over time. Furthermore, our results satisfy the main criteria for CCE and suggest potential mechanisms for CCE that do not rely on complex cognition. (Abstract)

Sasaki, Takao and Stephen Pratt. The Psychology of Superorganisms: Collective Decision Making by Insect Societies. Annual Review of Entomology. 63/259, 2018. An Oxford University zoologist and Arizona State University neurobiologist advance understandings of how such creaturely groupings can attain an overall cognitive faculty, which in turn serves their viable survival. We also cite because S. Pratt was an advisor to Paul Davies (ASU) for his 2019 book (search) about such common tendencies, aka The Logic of Life, of social communities to seek and reach a distributed intelligence, with allusions to our worldwide humanity.

Under the superorganism concept, insect societies are so tightly integrated that they possess features analogous to those of single organisms, including collective cognition. Here, we review research that uses psychological approaches to understand decision making by colonies. The application of neural models to collective choice shows basic similarities between how brains and colonies balance speed/accuracy trade-offs in decision making. Experimental analyses have explored collective rationality, cognitive capacity, and perceptual discrimination at both individual and colony levels. A major theme is the emergence of improved colony-level function from interactions among relatively less capable individuals. Collective learning is a nascent field for the further application of psychological methods to colonies. (Abstract)

Schneider, Jonathan, et al. One, Two, and Many — A Perspective on What Groups of Drosophila melanogaster Can Tell Us About Social Dynamics. Advances in Genetics. Volume 77, 2012. With coauthors Jade Atallah and Joel Levine, University of Toronto at Mississauga biologists bring a novel dimension to the expanded study of minimal, once isolate organisms. Professor Levine’s group combined clever experimental studies of fruit fly interactive behaviors such as mating strategies, aggression, learning and memory abilities, which were found to express generic complex network phenomena. In regard, these findings are seen to evince that even seemingly simple, seemingly chaotic insects actually exhibit intricate behaviors of similar group dynamics as all animal societies do. This unique realization that even rudimentary invertebrates manifest nature’s relational universality adds still further credence to this pervasive source.

In the natural world, interactions between individuals occur in groups: an individual must recognize others, identify social opportunities, and discriminate among these options to engage in an interactive behavior. The presence of the group is known to exert an influence on individual group members, and this influence may feed back through the individual to affect behavior across the group. Such feedback has been observed in Drosophila melanogaster, for example, when mating frequency increases in groups composed of mixed strains compared to homogenous groups. A working hypothesis is that social processes—to recognize, identify, discriminate, and engage—are innate. They rely on a combination of genetic inheritance, molecular interactions, and cell circuitry that produce neural and immunological responses. Here, we discuss studies that emphasize social interactions in four categories in Drosophila melanogaster: learning, circadian clocks, aggression, and mating. We also speculate that a systems-level network approach to the study of Drosophila groups will be instrumental in understanding the genetic basis of emergent group-level behavior. (Abstract)

In the first part of this perspective, we consider several broad behavioral categories and emphasize effects elicited by social context. We also present several cases of groups exhibiting emergent properties arising through the dynamic interactions of group members. In the second part, we advocate treating groups of flies as complex systems, with many interactions and feed back loops between individuals. These relationships may explain the emergence of group-level behavioral patterns and allow us to understand the mechanisms that generate them. We have begun to approach the biology of the fly at a group level using system-level tools from network theory. (61-62)

The emergent group-level phenotypes highlighted above suggest that groups of flies undergo dynamic organization. Such complex systems display qualities that are not present at the individual level but are the additive and nonadditive effects of individual interactions. Analogous to the current “systems approach” to cell and molecular processes, we have begun to study the biology of the fly at a group level using network theory. Network analysis may be used to study individuals and their interaction patterns within a group. (70)

Seeley, Thomas, et al. Group Decision Making in Honey Bee Swarms. American Scientist. May-June, 2006. When a swarm of 10,000 bees go hunting for a new nest site, how do they survey and decide? This study from Cornell University’s renowned entomology department finds it is achieved via a group intelligence based on autonomous inputs from several hundred scouts, which leads to a sensed quorum, rather than to consensus or compromise. Three organizational factors are involved: a diversity of inputs is allowed, a minimum of slavish conformity, and a tendency to swiftly aggregate independent reports to offset competition. The paper closes with a suggestion that such apian wisdom could much avail human groups to …achieve collective intelligence and thus avoid collective folly.

Seuront, Laurent. Behavioral Fractality in Marine Copepods: Endogenous Rhythms vs. Exogenous Stressors. Physica A. In Press, October, 2010. In the early reign of natural philosophy, it was believed that every species and realm exemplified each other and a deep design. In the 21st century, a Flinders University biologist finds these Arthropoda planktons to indeed embody a ubiquitous, dynamic scale-invariance.

The presence of endogenous rhythms in the swimming behavior of five common species of copepods (i.e. minute marine crustaceans) was investigated through comparisons of the scaling properties of their three-dimensional trajectories and cumulative probability distribution function of move lengths recorded during the day and at night. The low and high fractal dimensions respectively observed during daytime in the dark and during night-time under conditions of simulated daytime indicate that these organisms have the ability to adjust the complexity of their swimming path depending on exogenous factors, independent of their actual endogenous rhythms. (Abstract)

Behavioral time series, though they often appear erratic, reveal 1/f like spectra; they are fractal-like because they display self-similar fluctuations over a wide range of time scales. Long-rang correlation in biological systems is adaptive because it serves as an organizing principle for highly complex, nonlinear processes and it avoids restricting the functional response of an organism to highly periodic behavior. (1)

Shellard, Adam and Roberto Mayor. Rules of Collective Migration from the Wildebeest to the Neural Crest. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. July, 2020. In this Collective Migration in Biological Systems issue, University College London biologists go on to report, explain and depict life’s constant active groupings from self-propelled particles to bacteria, cancer and every Metazoan phylum. An especial point is the common affinity between early developmental processes and large herds on the move.

Collective migration, the movement of groups in which individuals affect the behaviour of one another, occurs at every scale from bacteria up to whole species' populations. Universal principles of collective movement can be applied at all levels. In this review, we describe the rules governing collective motility, with a specific focus on the neural crest, an embryonic stem cell population that undergoes extensive migration during development. We will discuss how the underlying principles of individual cell behaviour, and those that emerge from a supracellular scale, can explain collective migration. (Abstract)

Three rules of collective migration: Attraction: a behaviour that causes individuals to steer towards the centre of mass, which is the average position of individuals within a certain radius. Repulsion: a factor that causes individuals to steer away from all its neighbours. Alignment: a behaviour whence individuals line up with others close by, such that it moves with the averaged heading of the nearby individuals.

Shou, Wenying, et al. Synthetic Cooperation in Engineered Yeast Populations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104/1877, 2007. From the Computational Biology Program, Laboratory of Living Matter, and Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at Rockefeller University, how genetic modifications can give rise to a beneficial mutuality in yeast cultures.

Although the interplay between cooperative organisms in natural systems must be far richer and deeper, we show that even in a simplified synthetic cooperative system, novel properties such as an increased ability to stay alive could emerge. (1880)

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