Self-organization, Infectious Disease, and Social Behavior - An Evolutionary Tale?

Modern epidemiology rests on the recognition that social interactions shape infectious disease dynamics. This coupling, however, is naturally bidirectional, with disease dynamics also influencing ongoing social dynamics. In this talk, we’ll explore the intersection of network science, evolutionary theory, epidemiology, and disease ecology to examine how individual-level choices about affiliation, risk tolerance, contact, and cooperation can generate emergent social structures with consequences that feed back onto both epidemic dynamics and evolutionary fitness, expanding the conversation beyond the strictly epidemiological and ecological to also include evolution governing emergent social organization.

We will begin with a few simple, toy models that demonstrate how social systems may be organized, constrained, and sometimes protected by the pressures pathogens impose and continue with some more complex and tailored explorations that demonstrate the different ways in which disease risk can alter the costs and benefits of social life. We will invoke multi-level selection arguments to describe how individual advantage can produce group-level structure, and that group-level structure can in turn reshape individual risk, collective resilience, and pathogen persistence. Lastly, we’ll discuss some implications at the interface of social behavior and immune-epidemiology and provide a sneak peek at some extensions of this work into higher order networks methods currently underway.