Date & Time

July 30 (Mon), 2018. 16:00-(17:00)

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Location

Large conference room, Primate Research Institute, Inuyama

霊長類研究所 大会議室

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Speaker

Cedric Sueur, PhD

Institut Pluridisciplinnaire Hubert Curien, France

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Title

Mechanisms of evolution of social networks: a focus on socio-ecological pressures

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Abstract

Social networks ‒ i.e., how frequently individuals interact, a nd with whom ‒ may be affected by socioecological factors: food distribution, predation, access to reproduction, disease pressure, and access to information. These socio-ecological pressures affect individual social behaviour that increases the benefit-costs ratio of group-living and can be reflected in indiv idual fitness. However, social information and/or infectious agent that an individual is exposed to, and so the fitness consequences of these factors, are not entirely dependent on the individual's own social interactions, but is also affected by the topology on the entire network. It is therefore crucial to understand how netwo rk properties might co-vary with socio-ecological factors as determinants of survival and fitness of social animals. This paper reviews how the five aforementioned ecological pressures may affect social network topology and discuss how evolutionary processes, specifically genetic (i.e., genes) and cultural (i.e., learned behaviour) evolution, may even result in a specific composition of individuals' social strategies that produce network topologies optimized to specific ecological conditions. We conclude that studies focusing on whe ther and how well networks resist to changing conditions (i.e. socioecological pressures) might prov ide a better understanding of the rules underlying individual behaviour that influences network topology, a process that we have called network evolution. Evolutionary processes may favour a group phenotypic composition, thus a network topology. This has be referred to as a “collective social niche construction" .