Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

11 Social Models from Non-Human Systems

Theodore P. Pavlic

School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering and the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA

It is natural to eschew consideration of the nonhuman world when seeking understanding of the complex social‐behavioral landscape of human phenomena. Humans build cities, form governments, make laws, write poetry, and make decisions that are evidently products of deliberate, long‐term planning – all things that seem to be absent from most of the nonhuman world. Anthropologists sometimes look to nonhuman primates for insights into human social behavior because they are a closely related out‐group that can be used as a reference for understanding the evolutionary trajectory of hominids. Despite the use of the idiom “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for an important human social behavior, the use of birds and bees and other nonhuman organisms is almost entirely restricted to cases where there is high correspondence between physiological mechanisms under study. An ant colony seems to be a poor model for a human society because it lacks realistic detail and scaling, and so any analogy between ant colonies and human groups is largely thought to be “for the birds.”

However, experienced quantitative modelers recognize that models live on a continuum – from analogous to metaphorical – and are defined by how they are used and not what they are made of. Box (1979