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联合收割机考古学的长期视角与生物学，经济学和人口学的视角相结合，以确定为什么复杂的人类经济经常持续存在，但有时在人口增长，环境变化和全球化的条件下失败的原因。 通过数学建模和案例研究分析，该项目将提高对社会生态环境的认识，这些环境导致一些全球化系统经历临界点和快速的社会破坏。 该项目还将有助于了解社交网络的性质如何在异质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，特定的演变轨迹如何导致稳健性-脆弱性权衡。 关于过去导致不同结果的条件的新见解将扩大分析视角，并有助于制定健全的政策。 该项目还将产生有关人类基因组多样性、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本项目期间产生的数据。本项目采用复杂系统的新兴科学来理解为什么有些系统显示渐变，而另一些系统则经历与临界点相关的突变。 研究人员试图发现，在何种条件下，将当地人类经济联系成更大的区域经济的社交网络成功地科普了环境变化和人口增长，以及在何种条件下，这种变化会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。 研究人员将评估一个特定的假设，即史前德克萨斯州沿海平原上的个人发展了财产权和更密集的社交网络，以通过非正式的保险市场保持对补充资源的获取，这有助于他们成功地科普人口增长和6,000年来不断变化的环境条件。 日益密集的社交网络可能已经创造了一个隐藏的脆弱性;然而，由于得克萨斯州沿海平原的群体可能已经变得如此相互依赖，以至于一个地方的资源短缺从一个社会级联到另一个社会。为了验证这一假设，研究人员将结合联合收割机生物经济模型，社会网络分析，分子遗传学和考古数据。 研究结果将有助于阐明动态网络的一般设计原则，这些原则在长时间尺度上对人口增长和气候变化具有鲁棒性。 该项目通过NSF跨学科行为和社会科学研究（IBSS）竞赛获得支持。

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.