Multilevel Selection Shaping Adaptive Social Networks

Cédric Sueur, Jean-Louis Deneubourg

Understanding how human and non-human animal social networks evolve through emergent properties and feedback mechanisms is essential for explaining their adaptability and persistence. Collective social niche construction refers to the process where individuals, through their interactions, actively shape the social environment, resulting in network structures that influence individual behaviours and drive the emergence of adaptive properties. These emergent properties arise from these interactions, producing complex and efficient networks capable of optimising communication, cooperation, and problem-solving. Processes as self-organisation and phase transitions demonstrate how localised interactions can trigger critical transitions, rapidly restructuring network topology to enhance adaptability under changing conditions. These self-organized processes are fundamental to the Cumulative Cultural Brain Hypothesis, which proposes that increasingly complex and efficient networks foster the development of advanced cognitive abilities and social learning. The resulting enhancement of communication and information processing, in turn, facilitates further network complexity and efficiency, creating a positive feedback loop that supports cultural accumulation and resilience. This perspective integrates insights from evolutionary biology, behavioural ecology, and network science to highlight the dynamic and adaptive nature of social networks, where self-organisation and cumulative processes continually reshape network topology to meet ecological and social demands.