Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Why Study Social Dynamics?
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Social dynamics merit study for three major reasons. First, the changing rela-
tionships between individuals are the building blocks from which dynamic
social structures are assembled. Understanding their emergent properties, such
as dominance hierarchies and social competition, is essential to tackling fun-
damental questions about the evolution of sociality (Pollock 1994). Second,
because social dynamics are the product of interaction between individuals'
ecology and behavior (Rubenstein 1993), they are relevant to predicting and
managing the consequences of many human interventions for conservation or
management. Third, an important motivation for understanding nonhuman
societies is the light this throws on human behavior. Each of these three topics
is vast, but we fleetingly mention them in turn.
EVOLUTION OF SOCIALITY
The diverse relationships of individuals in a social network interact to create
complex emergent patterns. These patterns, like the vortex that appears in an
emptying sink, is not contained in the structure of a single component.
Because a society represents a whole with properties different from those of its
component parts, the ultimate consequences of social interactions may be
remote from an observed action. This is a fact that evolution by natural selec-
tion can take in its stride but that we, as primarily linear cause-and-effect
thinkers, may find hard to accommodate. It may be clear that a lion killing a
zebra is behaving adaptively, but less clear whether it is adaptive when the same
lion prevents a conspecific from feeding at the kill. The immediate effect is that
the first lion may have more food to eat, but the ultimate effects reverberate
through a stochastically unpredictable system of long-term consequences
among the whole pride. Denied food or coalitionary aid by an ally of the
snubbed individual at a later date, the fitness consequences for the originally
possessive lion may be far from advantageous. An understanding of social
dynamics offers insight into the adaptation of individual responses evolved
from selection operating on them from the level of emergent systems.
CONSERVATION APPLICATIONS
Many problems in wildlife conservation and management involve humans
causing changes to animal populations or their environment. In applied work,
