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把考古学的长期观点与生物学、经济学和人口学的观点结合起来，找出复杂的人类经济在人口增长、环境变化和全球化的条件下经常持续存在但有时却失败的原因。通过数学建模和案例研究分析，该项目将增强对导致某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认识。该项目还将有助于了解社会网络的性质如何在异质环境中随时间演变，以及在人口增长和环境变化的条件下，特定的进化轨迹如何导致健壮性-脆弱性权衡。关于过去导致不同结果的条件的新见解将拓宽分析视角，并有助于制定合理的政策。该项目还将产生有关人类基因组多样性、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项目中产生的数据。该项目采用复杂系统的新兴科学来理解为什么一些系统表现出渐进的变化，而另一些系统则经历与临界点相关的突然变化。调查人员试图发现，在什么条件下，将当地人类经济连接成更大的区域经济的社会网络能够成功地应对环境变化和人口增长，以及在什么条件下，这种变化产生多米诺骨牌效应，通过这种多米诺骨牌效应，一个社会的崩溃导致其他社会的崩溃。研究人员将评估一个具体的假设，即史前德克萨斯海岸平原上的个体发展了财产权和更密集的社会网络，通过非正式的保险市场保持获得互补资源的机会，这有助于他们在6000年的时间里成功地应对人口增长和不断变化的环境条件。日益密集的社交网络可能造成了一种隐藏的脆弱性；然而，由于德克萨斯州沿海平原上的群体可能变得如此相互依赖，以至于一个地方的资源枯竭会从一个社会级联到另一个社会。为了验证这一假设，研究人员将结合生物经济模型、社会网络分析、分子遗传学和考古数据。这些结果将有助于阐明在人口增长和气候变化的长期尺度上具有鲁棒性的动态网络的一般设计原则。本项目由美国国家科学基金会跨学科行为与社会科学研究（IBSS）竞赛资助。

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.