Daniel Steinbock

That’s the tentative, super-scholarly title for the paper I’m working on this week.

Broadly speaking, I’m looking at the question of “why is society structured the way it is?” Of the vast structural possibilities, we see only a few general types in the world. Is there some evolutionary pressure that selects some social structures as being more successful than others? If so, what are possible criteria for structural fitness? This paper puts forth the hypothesis that searchability is a plausible fitness test: that a successful structure is one that facilitates the finding of important or knowledgeable actors with minimal effort. This theory of mine, and its accompanying simulation study, shed light on the search and structure of human networks and of socially-constructed networks like the world wide web.