Erol Akçay
Department of Biology
University of Pennsylvania

Coevolution of social behavior and social networks

The evolution of social behaviors is crucially determined by social structure, i.e., the pattern of interactions between individuals in a population. I explore how this social structure itself can evolve through social selection. I present a series of models that capture realistic variation in social structure and how it coevolves with social traits such as cooperation and culturally transmitted behaviors. These models illustrate how feedbacks between social structure and social evolution can lead to new kinds of evolutionary dynamics.