The Banana Peel Project

How does feedback change what we do with our social networks and how we think about them? In my last post, I defined some ways that digital social networking technologies (DSNTs; I really need a better term–any ideas?) provide us with lots of feedback about the extent, density and depth of our social networks.
So […]

Social networking is not new. Clearly, social networks exist among all social organisms. Gorillas, obviously, for one. Birds, too. Even fish: in a 2006 Nature article, Lee Dugatkin showed that fish keep track of other fishes’ social networks and make decisions about who to cooperate with based on that information.
Humans, of […]

Yesterday, I left off by suggesting that cultural processes can feed back into genetic evolution using Nicholas Wade’s example of dairy farming. In this second post about the role of feedback in evolution, I want to talk about niche construction: what it means, and the different levels at which it happens.
I linked to an […]