Eusociality

Social system

In sociology, a social system is the patterned network of relationships constituting a coherent whole that exist between individuals, groups, and institutions. It is the formal structure of role and status that can form in a small, stable group. An individual may belong to multiple social systems at once; examples of social systems include nuclear family units, communities, cities, nations, college campuses, religions, corporations, and industries. The organization and definition of groups within a social system depend on various shared properties such as location, socioeconomic status, race, religion, societal function, or other distinguishable features.

Novelo Social

Novelo Social

Human–Animal Interaction and Human Prosociality: A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental and Correlational Studies

Pet ownership and interactions with animals confer various physiological and psychological benefits to humans. Although interactions with animals are commonplace, there is no consensus in the liter...

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. The essays, initially published in the English periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896, explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic depictions by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. Instead, Kropotkin argues that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities and, along with the conscience, has been promoted through natural selection.

Heterospecific social behavior in primates: insights into the evolutionary roots of pet-keeping

Primate interspecific interactions with both other primates and non-primate species range from predator–prey dynamics to affiliative behaviors such as grooming, play, and carrying. While many primates participate in interspecific associations or commensal relationships, to our knowledge interspecific social interactions have never been systematically synthesized. Here, we present the first comprehensive review of such interactions, compiling 427 cases from the literature, media sources, and a global survey of primatologists. These involved 88 primate species and 127 non-primate species (including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, malacostracans, and insects) across wild (n = 311) and captive (n = 111) contexts. The most frequent interactions occurred within or between primate families (e.g., Cercopithecidae–Cercopithecidae, Cebidae–Atelidae), though affiliative behaviors were also directed toward distantly related taxa such as dogs and birds. Play (n = 139) and grooming (n = 136) were most common. Juveniles and infants predominantly engaged in play, while adult females were more likely to groom. Adult males were less affiliative overall. Contrary to expectations, affiliative behaviors were not more often directed toward immature than adult heterospecifics. Primates were the initiators in most interactions. These findings offer new insights into the diversity and contexts of heterospecific sociality in primates and suggest that some behavioral tendencies relevant to later forms of human–animal companionship – such as caregiving, tolerance, and exploratory play – may be more widespread among primates than previously recognized.

Children's Acquisition and Application of Norms

All human societies are permeated by collectively shared entities that govern daily social interactions and promote coordination and cooperation: norms. While the study of norm development is not new to developmental psychology, it has only recently been the target of an interdisciplinary wave of research using new methodologies and (often) complementary theoretical accounts to describe and explain the origins and potentially species-unique aspects of human norm psychology. Here we review recent developmental research showing that young children swiftly acquire and infer norms in a variety of social contexts. Moreover, children actively enforce these norms, even as unaffected bystanders, when third parties do things the wrong way. This research suggests that the foundations of human norm psychology can be found in early childhood. Deeper insights into the ontogenetic roots of norm psychology may contribute to understanding the evolutionary emergence of human cooperation and its maintenance in the contemporary world.

twinkl.social ☆ under construction

twinkl.social — a horrifying and beautiful amalgamation of everything cringe and iconic about the early web, built on ATProto.

Self-Organization in Biological Systems

The synchronized flashing of fireflies at night. The spiraling patterns of an aggregating slime mold. The anastomosing network of army-ant trails. The coordinated movements of a school of fish. Researchers are finding in such patterns—phenomena that have fascinated naturalists for centuries—a fertile new approach to understanding biological systems: the study of self-organization. This book, a primer on self-organization in biological systems for students and other enthusiasts, introduces readers to the basic concepts and tools for studying self-organization and then examines numerous examples of self-organization in the natural world. Self-organization refers to diverse pattern formation processes in the physical and biological world, from sand grains assembling into rippled dunes to cells combining to create highly structured tissues to individual insects working to create sophisticated societies. What these diverse systems hold in common is the proximate means by which they acquire order and structure. In self-organizing systems, pattern at the global level emerges solely from interactions among lower-level components. Remarkably, even very complex structures result from the iteration of surprisingly simple behaviors performed by individuals relying on only local information. This striking conclusion suggests important lines of inquiry: To what degree is environmental rather than individual complexity responsible for group complexity? To what extent have widely differing organisms adopted similar, convergent strategies of pattern formation? How, specifically, has natural selection determined the rules governing interactions within biological systems? Broad in scope, thorough yet accessible, this book is a self-contained introduction to self-organization and complexity in biology—a field of study at the forefront of life sciences research.

The ultrasocial origin of the Anthropocene

The current geological epoch has been dubbed the Anthropocene—the age of humans. We argue that the roots of the Anthropocene lie in the agricultural revolution that began some 8000years ago. Unique human psychological and cultural characteristics were present in our distant hunter–gatherer past, but in terms of the biophysical impact of our species, agricultural represented an unequivocal and decisive evolutionary break. With the transition to agriculture human society began to function as a superorganism functioning as a single unit designed by social natural selection to produce economic surplus. Where environmental conditions were permitted, early human agricultural societies followed the same pattern as a few social insects and exhibited explosive population growth, complex and detailed division of labor, intensive resource exploitation, territorial expansion, and a social organization favoring the survival and growth of the supergroup over the well-being of individuals within the group. Similar economic forces lie behind ultrasociality in social insects and humans—increased productivity from the division of labor, increasing returns to scale, and the exploitation of stocks of productive resources. Exploring the evolutionary mechanisms behind ultrasociality offers insights into the growth imperative that threatens the stability of the earth's life support systems.

How social norms emerge: The interindividual actor–critic.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

From Mutual Aid In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a … Continued