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

这个跨学科的研究项目将结合考古学的长期视角与生物学、经济学和人口学的视角，找出复杂的人类经济在人口增长、环境变化和全球化条件下经常存在但有时失败的原因。通过数学建模和案例分析，该项目将加强对导致一些全球化系统经历临界点和快速社会破坏的社会生态背景的了解。该项目还将有助于理解社会网络的性质如何在不同的环境中随着时间的推移而演变，以及在人口增长和环境变化的条件下，特定的演变轨迹可能如何导致稳健性和脆弱性的权衡。对过去导致不同结果的条件的新见解将拓宽分析视角，并有助于健全的政策制定。该项目还将产生有关人类基因组多样性以及财产权和非正式保险市场演变的新数据。来自传统上代表性不足的群体的学生将直接参与研究和分析在这个项目中产生的数据。这个项目利用新兴的复杂系统科学来理解为什么一些系统表现出渐进变化，而另一些系统经历与临界点相关的突变。研究人员试图发现，将当地人类经济连接成更大的区域经济的社会网络在什么条件下成功应对环境变化和人口增长，以及这种变化在什么条件下产生多米诺骨牌效应，通过这种效应，一个社会的崩溃会导致其他社会的崩溃。研究人员将评估这一具体假设，即史前德克萨斯海岸平原上的个人发展了财产权和更密集的社会网络，以通过非正式的保险市场保持对互补资源的访问，这帮助他们成功地应对了6000年来人口增长和环境条件的变化。日益密集的社交网络可能造成了隐藏的脆弱性；然而，由于德克萨斯海岸平原上的群体可能变得如此相互依赖，以至于一个当地地区的资源短缺从一个社会蔓延到另一个社会。为了验证这一假设，研究人员将结合生物经济建模、社会网络分析、分子遗传学和考古学数据。这些结果将有助于阐明动态网络的一般设计原则，这些网络在长时间尺度上对人口增长和气候变化具有健壮性。该项目通过NSF跨学科行为和社会科学研究(IBSS)竞赛得到支持。

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.