Canada 150 Research Chair in Biological Dystopias

大多数曾经发起的社会都将以毁灭告终。我们探索是什么让一些社会蓬勃发展，而另一些社会则枯萎和死亡。我们通过设计具有不同集体属性(人口统计、组成、架构)的实验社会来解决这个问题，然后在实验室和现场评估它们的表现。我们进一步探讨了促进社会韧性的因素。我们已经证明，一些社会能够感觉到它们即将消亡，并部署社会适应来规避潜在的灭绝，并从持续的、不利的社会状态中恢复过来。与人类一样，许多社会都处在转型成功和即将根除之间的转折点上。

Most societies ever initiated will end in ruin. We explore what allows some societies to flourish while others wither and die. We approach this topic by engineering experimental societies with different collective attributes (demographics, compositions, architectures) and then evaluating their performance in the lab and field. We further probe the factors that promote societal resilience. We’ve shown that some societies can sense their forthcoming demise and deploy social adaptations to circumvent would-be extinction and bounce back from persistent, disadvantageous social states. Not unlike humans, many societies reside on the tipping point between transformative success and imminent eradication.