Social Complex Systems as Multiscale Phenomena: From the Genome to Animal Societies

Abstract

For decades, researchers have studied animal social phenomena and aimed to answer: What is social complexity? Are some animals more socially complex than others? However, social complexity concepts are far from agreed and the field is still open to new research approaches. In this position paper, we propose to frame social complexity as a problem of organized complexity (whereby multiple scales and interactions across components produce patterns and organization). To improve our understanding of sociality, we encourage building a “social complexity theory” at the intersection of complex systems, behavioral ecology, and social systems concepts. This manuscript highlights the importance of considering social complexity as a multiscale phenomenon and raise the presence of trade-offs between scales. We illustrate the relationship between complexity and scales with examples from genomic to population scale in animal societies. Moreover, we suggest giving special attention to genome-scale studies to provide a common ground for comparing complexity among animal species and put forward comparative genomics as an approximation to drive the understanding of the evolution of social complexity.