Anna Dornhaus: Professor, Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona
Monday, January 6, 2025,
2:30pm – 3:30pm,
ASA Koffler Great Room and Zoom
We often wish that our societies were more collectively intelligent. Too often it seems that the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ turns into destructive ‘groupthink’. By drawing parallels between diverse systems, Anna Dornhaus offers insights into what helps and hinders collective problem-solving in human societies by drawing parallels to other biological and human/engineered systems facing similar problems or showing similar outcomes. We’ll discover how natural and engineered systems like ant colonies, cellular societies, and computer networks pool individual behaviors and intelligence into sometimes sophisticated, other times destructive group-level outcomes. We’ll focus on effects of self-organization in creating effective information flow or ‘social bubbles’, traffic jams, and symmetry breaking. All of these processes are observed in biology from molecules to ecosystems, and in many physical processes as well as artificial systems like stock markets. We’ll also examine the role of evolution in determining how individual behavior fits into collective goals, something that is often forgotten in discussions of human collective behavior. Lastly, we will discuss how these processes of evolution, communication, and self-organization allow groups to thrive or fail, and what we may be able to do about it.
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