Meeting Abstract
The structure of animal and human societies, i.e., the distribution and arrangement of social bonds between individuals, is an important determinant of individual behavior, health, and ultimately fitness. Recently, there has been a lot of interest in quantifying social structure using tools from network science and understanding how social network structure affects behaviors and fitness. This work has largely been descriptive, and we currently lack generative models of how social networks form and are structured. I will present our recent work that provides a simple and general model that can explain important characteristics of social networks observed in animal societies. The crucial ingredient in this model is the process of social inheritance, the tendency of offspring to be connected to the same individuals as their parents. Building on this model, I will show results from an evolutionary model where social network position and the behavioral phenotypes of one’s social connections affect individual fitness, and where social bonding traits co-evolve with the behavioral phenotype. We show that there is a tension between the evolution of social structure promoting cooperation and the evolution of cooperative behaviors themselves. I will discuss ways in which psychological and behavioral mechanisms can resolve this tension.
