Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
My new paper “What are we missing about animal social complexity?” was just released as a preprint on arXiv. It’s also in review at Animal Behaviour as part of a special issue organized by Rafa Rodriguez (U. Wisconsin-Milwaukee) that came out of a symposium he organized called “What Are We Not Asking About The Evolution of Behavior That We Should Be Asking” at this summer’s Animal Behavior Conference.… [Read full details]
My new paper, co-authored with Dan Mønster and Simon DeDeo, is now available as a preprint on arXiv.
The question of what animals understand about their social worlds is fundamental to studies of the evolution of sociality, cognition, and animal culture.… [Read full details]
I gave a talk called “Detecting the Basis of Sociocultural Complexity in Animals and Humans” in the satellite meeting “Evolution of Cultural Complexity”, which was part of the Complex Systems Society Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece.
The talk was co-authored with Dan Mønster and Simon DeDeo.… [Read full details]
Our new paper, “Social tipping points in animal societies” was published! This was a fun effort with a great group of people, and is my first paper as “anchor author”.
Paper (open access) available from Proceedings B
Animal social groups are complex systems that are likely to exhibit tipping points—which are defined as drastic shifts in the dynamics of systems that arise from small changes in environmental conditions—yet this concept has not been carefully applied to these systems.… [Read full details]
I co-led a working group at Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) at the Ohio State University this week with Erol Akçay. Along with Mike Levy, we worked on a project called “Dynamic feedbacks between social structure and behaviors”.
The evolution and consequences of social behaviors depend crucially on the
social environment they are expressed in.… [Read full details]
I attended the Animal Behavior Society Conference at the University of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was invited to speak in the symposium “What Are We Not Asking About The Evolution of Behavior That We Should Be Asking“.
I gave a talk called “What are we missing in current measures of animal social complexity?”… [Read full details]
I attended the Animal Behavior Society Conference at the University of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I gave a research talk called “Signals of quality vs. individual recognition: A model of the tradeoffs in assessment strategies” (co-authored with Eleanor Harris).… [Read full details]
I participated in a working group at SFI on cumulative culture. I also gave a talk where I discussed the potential for the seeds of cumulative culture to emerge from animal and human interaction rules.
Overview of the working group (from SFI’s coverage here):
Throughout human evolutionary history, individuals have developed new ideas, materials, and technologies, then passed them on to other individuals and groups.
I invited David Fisher to SFI for a research collaboration visit. We had a great time talking about new ideas, networks, hierarchies, and more all week, and even fit in some hiking at the Tsankawi Ruins.
David gave a talk while he was at SFI:
Estimating Indirect Effects in a Wild and Anti-Social Mammal
Nearly all organisms interact with conspecifics at some point in their lives, and as such can affect one another’s phenotypes.… [Read full details]