VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twindividuality

2. Complex Local to Global Network Biosocieties

Garcia, E. Andres. The Use of Complex Adaptive Systems in Organizational Studies. Francis Heylighen, et al, eds. The Evolution of Complexity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999. Nonlinear dynamics are applied to social, economic and ecological systems to reveal “a nested hierarchy of open, interconnected systems.”

All of these fields seem to be converging on a paradigm composed of a set of principles common to complex systems, principles which appear to be independent of the specific domain under investigation by consistently operating across many spatial and temporal scales, resolutions, systems types, and scientific disciplines. (281)

Gavrilets, Sergey and Peter Richerson. Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norm Internalization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 114/6068, 2017. A University of Tennessee ecologist and an UC Davis environmentalist trace a constant propensity for human groupings to evolve toward more beneficial behaviors via a formation of tacit, agreed standards.

People often ignore material costs they incur when following existing social norms. Some individuals and groups are often willing to pay extremely high costs to enact, defend, or promulgate specific values and norms that they consider important. Such behaviors, often decreasing biological fitness, represent an evolutionary puzzle. We study theoretically the evolutionary origins of human capacity to internalize and follow social norms. We focus on two general types of collective actions our ancestors were regularly involved in: cooperation to overcome nature’s challenges and conflicts with neighboring groups. We show that norm internalization evolves under a wide range of conditions, making cooperation “instinctive.” We make testable predictions about individual and group behavior. (Significance)

Gintis, Herbert. Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 206/2, 2000. Empirical studies can quantify a pervasive tendency for mutual aid among social assemblies.

Girardini, Nicolo, et al.. Community Aware Temporal Network Generation. arXiv:2501.07327.. University of Trento and Aix-Marseille University illustrate this definitive structural presence of personal interrelations. Once again, an interplay of equally real node and link modes forms and graces our cultural trinity.

The realization that temporal networks suffuse complex dynamics has become a way to better define real world systems. However, social datasets have many drawbacks. In this work, we extend a recent network generation approach to capture the evolution of interactions between different communities. Our method labels nodes based on their affiliation and sets up surrogate networks. This enables the generation of synthetic relations that mimic actual behaviors. (Excerpt)

Gligor, Mircea and Margareta Ignat. Some Demographic Crashes Seen as Phase Transitions. Physica A. 301/535, 2001. Population dynamics exhibit an underlying mathematical basis when modeled by nonlinear statistical theories.

The interest in searching for power laws in the description of complex, collective phenomena is caused by the fact that these power laws are universal, that is to a large degree independent of the microscopic details of the phenomenon. As such, they are typical features of a collective mechanism like the phase transitions: many observables behave as universal power laws in the vicinity of the transition point. Also, the interest for power laws is related to an important property of power laws, namely scale invariance: the characteristic length scale of a physical system at its crritical point is infinite, leading to self-similar, scale-free flucations. (536)

Goldstone, Robert and Marco Janssen. Computational Models of Collective Behavior. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 9/9, 2005. A survey of how complex systems theory is bringing a new explanatory basis to the human sciences – sociology, economics, psychology, anthropology. By computational is meant the use of “agent-based models” whereby tacit rules inform interactions between autonomous entities as they self-organize into emergent group behaviors.

Goldstone, Robert, et al. Emergent Processes in Group Behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 17/1, 2008. Researchers at Indiana University use agent-based computational models to quantify how human communities of many kinds might take on a life and cognitive capacity of their own.

Just as neurons interconnect in networks that create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individual neuron, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive. (10) Social phenomena such as the spread of gossip, the World-Wide Web, the popularity of cultural icons, legal systems, and scientific establishments all take on a life of their owe, complete with their own self-organized divisions of labor and specialization, feedback loops, growth, and adaptations. (10)

Gontier, Nathalie and Anton Sukhoverkhov.. Reticulate evolution underlies synergistic trait formation in human communities. Evolutionary Anthropology. 32/1,. Evolutionary Anthropology. 32/1, 2021. University of Lisbon and Kuban State Agrarian University scholars (search Gontier) continue to development and application of this generic network quality as it serves to link living beingness across all development scales and groupings.

This paper investigates how reticulate evolution contributes better understandings of sociocultural evolution, along with community formation. Reticulate evolution occurs more by means of symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, infective heredity, and hybridization. We zoom in on symbiosis and show how it distinguishes (1) human, plant, animal, and machine interactions; (2) diet-microbiome relationships; and (3) host-virome and other pathogens affect human health and disease. Reticulate evolution requires an understanding of behavioral and cultural evolution at a community level, where causal processes lead to synergistic organizational traits. (Abstract)

Reticulate evolution differs from the vertical version studied by the Neodarwinists. In the latter paradigm, the focus lies on how descent lines ramify and diversify into lineages by natural selection or drift. The branching out of lineages brings forth tree of life typologies that are classically understood to depict the gradual modification of species over time. Reticulate evolution instead requires network typologies and web of life metaphors that depict how organisms belonging to different species interact in space. (1)

Guimera, R., et al. Self-Similar Community Structure in a Network of Human interactions. Physical Review E. 065103, 2003. In theory complex networks form a hierarchical structure of nested “communities.” This is borne out by a study of a large university email system. The authors go on to state that such “spontaneous self-organization” is an example of a universally present natural principle.

By using the same argument, one can expect that the scaling behavior we obtain should be observable in any human social network. At the same time, the similarity with river networks suggests that a common principle of optimization – of flow of information in organizations or of flow of water in rivers – could be the underlying driving force in the formation and evolution of social networks. (065103-4)

Hackenberg, Robert and Beverly Hackenberg. Notes Toward a New Future: Applied Anthropology in Century XXI. Human Organization. 63/4, 2004. Still another field, in this case to also be “postmodern,” finds that “nonlinear dynamic systems” theories are especially suitable to advance the study of multifaceted human societies. The main paper is An Anthropological Problem, A Complex Solution by Michael Agar whence “a narrative of connections and contingencies” and agent-based modeling can apply, e.g., to urban epidemics of illicit drug use.

Hall, Gavin and William Bialek. The Statistical Mechanics of Twitter. arXiv:1812.07029. As a global science proceeds on its electronic own, cross-informative networks are forming between widely separate fields. Here is an exemplary paper by Princeton University theorists which reports a connection in kind between webwide social chatter and physical dynamics. It is noted that this public verbose media tends to critical attractor modes. Once more across a broad stretch from uniVerse to usVerse, a common, recurrent, biterate conservation and discourse goes on. See also Searching for Collective Behavior in a Small Brain by W. Bialek and colleagues (1810.07623).

We build models for the distribution of social states in Twitter communities which can be defined by the participation vs. silence of individuals in conversations that surround key words. We approximate the joint distribution of these binary variables using the maximum entropy principle, finding the least structured models that match the mean probability of individuals tweeting and their pairwise correlations. These models provide accurate, quantitative descriptions of higher order structure in these social networks. The parameters of these models seem poised close to critical surfaces in the space of possible models, and we observe scaling behavior of the data under coarse-graining. These results suggest that simple models, grounded in statistical physics, may provide a useful point of view on the larger data sets now emerging from complex social systems. (Abstract)

Hamilton, Marcus, et al. Nonlinear Scaling of Space Use in Human Hunter-Gatherers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104/4765, 2007. This report grew from research programs of James Brown’s group at the University of New Mexico, which studies biocomplexity, scaling and macroecology. It merits special notice because this work is one of the first quantifications of how human groupings take on the same patterns and processes as an organism. What can then be broadly implied is a nested biological continuity throughout emergent evolution, of which, as long proposed, human social community can be appreciated with isomorphic kinship to a somatic and cerebral organic entity.

Even though buried within the 200+ pages of a weekly scientific journal, the paper exemplifies a welling discovery by humankind of a profoundly different comprehensible nature and cosmos suffused by such universally recurrent mathematical form and function, a quickening genesis in our midst if we would attend to it, as this website is trying to document.

The result is a complex social structure in which resources flow through social networks, which exhibit self-similar or fractal-like hierarchical scaling and are strikingly similar, quantitatively, to the hierarchically branched vascular networks that distribute metabolic resources within the bodies of plants and mammals and water from river drainage basins. (4765) Our results demonstrate that individual space use in hunter-gatherer societies scales nonlinearly or allometrically with population size. Furthermore, this power-law scaling relation is robust to differences in trophic foraging niche, ecosystem temperature, energy availability, geographic location, and cultural phylogeny. (4768)

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