Behavior & Decision-Making

Algorithmic Consensus

Andon Cord System

The andon cord represents a biological principle: distributed authority based on local knowledge. Just as prosocial primate leaders delegate threat re...

Centralized Motor Control

Voluntary movement in vertebrates exemplifies centralized control. When you decide to reach for a coffee cup, that action originates in your brain's m...

Coalition Defense

Coalition defense is the most important stability factor in hierarchies. In baboon troops studied over 40 years by Sapolsky: Alpha males with 2+ stron...

Cultural Transmission

Elephant matriarchs remember drought. Not abstractly - they remember specific water sources from droughts 50 years ago. During the 1993 Amboseli droug...

Despotic Leadership

In species with limited cognitive capacity and simple social structures, dominance often equals physical superiority. A dominant rhesus macaque monopo...

Dunbar's Number

How many people can you actually know? Anthropologist Robin Dunbar hypothesized that primate neocortex size limits stable social group size. His resea...

Flow State

Flow state is a state of deep, focused concentration where productivity can reach 5× normal levels (McKinsey study). Entering flow requires 15-23 minu...

Institutional Memory

Derived from cultural transmission in species like elephants, where older individuals serve as repositories of survival knowledge spanning multiple cy...

Lanchester's Square Law

Military strategist Frederick Lanchester discovered that fighting power scales with the square of coalition size, not linearly. This 'Square Law' appl...

Leadership Currencies

What determines alpha status varies dramatically across species, revealing multiple 'currencies' of dominance: Physical Currency (red deer antlers, el...

Lévy Flight Search Pattern

Lévy flights are a search pattern characterized by mostly short steps with occasional very long jumps, following a power law distribution. This patter...

Machiavellian Intelligence

The most cognitively advanced primates don't just form coalitions - they manipulate them. This requires understanding second-order relationships: 'A i...

Matthew Effect

Named by sociologist Robert Merton after the biblical passage 'to those who have, more will be given.' In science, highly cited papers gain more citat...

Multi-Generational Relay Migration

Monarch butterflies migrate 3,000 miles Mexico→Canada→Mexico across 4 generations. No individual completes the full loop. Generations 1-3 live 6 weeks...

Neural Redundancy

The nervous system exhibits redundancy through distributed representations - encoding information across populations of neurons rather than single cel...

Non-Transitive Dominance

Not all hierarchies are linear. Some species display circular or non-transitive dominance where A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A. This creates fasc...

Pecking Order Hierarchy

A linear hierarchy follows a simple rule: If A dominates B, and B dominates C, then A dominates C (transitivity). This creates a predictable rank orde...

Philopatry

Philopatry is the tendency to return to birthplace despite migration costs. Salmon return to exact stream where they were born via olfactory imprintin...

Prosocial Leadership/Dominance

In the most cognitively advanced species, leadership transcends even coalition politics to become genuinely prosocial. The most powerful alpha males i...

Random Walk

Random walk or Brownian motion is a search pattern involving movement in random directions with short steps, thoroughly searching local areas before m...

Shapley Value

Game theory's Shapley value predicts when coalitions remain stable versus fracture. Each member's fair share equals their marginal contribution to the...

Swarm Intelligence

Honeybee swarms face a life-or-death decision: choose a new nest site. The wrong choice means colony death. No single bee can evaluate all options. Ye...

Teaching Behaviors

Teaching is rare in nature - most species learn through observation and trial-and-error. Teaching requires: 1) Demonstrating behavior for learner's be...

Temporal Fractals

Beyond spatial fractals, self-similarity manifests across time scales in how processes unfold temporally. Career development, business cycles, product...

The 70% Solution

Evolution optimized for 70-80% efficiency, not 100%. Squirrels retrieve 70-80% of cached acorns - the missing 20-30% becomes forest regeneration. Clar...

The Grandmother Effect

In species where survival depends on accumulated knowledge, leadership often goes not to the strongest but to the most experienced. African elephant h...

Tit-for-Tat Strategy

Tit-for-tat strategy emerges in iterated games: Cooperate initially, then mirror partner's last move. If they cooperated, cooperate. If they defected,...

Vertical Integration

Biological systems demonstrate vertical integration where outputs of one process become inputs for the next - digestion → absorption → metabolism → en...

Winner Effect

The winner effect is powerful. A hen that wins 3 contests in a row has an 85% chance of winning the 4th, regardless of opponent size. Victory increase...