A Life-Cycle Model of Human Social Groups Produces a U-Shaped Distribution in Group Size.

A Life-Cycle Model of Human Social Groups Produces a U-Shaped Distribution in Group Size.

Blog Article

One of the central puzzles in the study of sociocultural evolution is how and why transitions from small-scale human groups to large-scale, hierarchically more complex ones occurred.Here we develop a spatially explicit agent-based model as a first step towards understanding the ecological dynamics of small discount greenery and large-scale human groups.By analogy with the interactions between single-celled and multicellular organisms, we build a theory of group lifecycles as an emergent property of single cell demographic and expansion behaviours.

We find that once the transition from small-scale to large-scale groups occurs, a few large-scale groups continue expanding while small-scale groups gradually become scarcer, depileve easy clean and large-scale groups become larger in size and fewer in number over time.Demographic and expansion behaviours of groups are largely influenced by the distribution and availability of resources.Our results conform to a pattern of human political change in which religions and nation states come to be represented by a few large units and many smaller ones.

Future enhancements of the model should include decision-making rules and probabilities of fragmentation for large-scale societies.We suggest that the synthesis of population ecology and social evolution will generate increasingly plausible models of human group dynamics.