IBSS:The Evolution of Social Networks and the Robustness of Human Societies to Population Growth and Environmental Change: A Deep Time Perspective

University Of Texas At San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

This interdisciplinary research project will combine the long-time perspective of archaeology with perspectives from biology, economics, and demography to identify reasons why complex human economies often persist but sometimes fail under conditions of population growth, environmental change, and globalization. Through mathematical modeling and a case study analysis, the project will enhance knowledge about the social-ecological contexts that cause some globalizing systems to experience tipping points and rapid social disruption. The project also will contribute to understanding how the nature of social networks evolve over time in heterogeneous environments and how specific trajectories of evolution may lead to robustness-vulnerability trade-offs under conditions of population growth and environmental change. New insights regarding the conditions that led to different outcomes in the past will broaden analytic perspectives and contribute to sound policy development. The project also will generate new data about the diversity of the human genome and the evolution of property rights and informal insurance markets. Students from traditionally underrepresented groups will be directly involved in conducting research and analyzing data produced during this project. This project employs the emerging science of complex systems to understand why some systems display gradual change and others experience abrupt changes associated with tipping points. The investigators seek to discover under what conditions the social networks that link local human economies into a larger, regional economy successfully cope with environmental change and population growth and under what conditions such changes generate a domino effect through which the collapse of one society causes others to collapse. The investigators will evaluate the specific hypothesis that individuals on the prehistoric Texas Coastal Plain developed property rights and denser social networks to maintain access to complementary resources via an informal insurance market, which helped them cope successfully with population growth and changing environmental conditions over a 6,000-year period. The increasingly dense social networks may have created a hidden fragility; however, as groups on the Texas Coastal Plain may have become so interdependent that resource failure in one local area cascaded from society to society. To test this hypothesis, the investigators will combine bioeconomic modeling, social network analysis, molecular genetics, and archaeological data. The results will help elucidate the general design principles of dynamic networks that are robust over long time scales to population growth and climate change. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.