It may seem odd, given the focus of this blog, to recommend a book on evolutionary biology. But Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene lays a solid foundation for helping to understand developments in the aggregation sciences.
Dawkins’ main thesis is that evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes, not organisms and not species. If it seems odd to think of dumb genes “competing” or acting “selfishly,” as the title suggests, then you’re catching on to what’s provocative about this book. If you have trouble wrapping your head around the ideas of complex adaptive systems and emergence, then take a step back and start by trying to understand selfish genes. If you can make the latter conceptual leap then the former becomes much easier to get. Dawkins helps with the learning process by giving many, many concrete examples and carefully reasoned, easy-to-follow arguments.
If you borrow the book rather than buying it, make sure that you get the 1989 edition or later; the newer edition has two new chapters that are essential. In particular, Chapter 12, “Nice guys finish first,” is about the evolution of cooperation and has quite a bit about game theory in it. Again, if you understand game theory and its impact on a population, then other ideas in aggregation science will come a lot easier.
One last point of interest is that Dawkins’ book is the origin of the term “meme”. If you’ve heard the term “idea virus,” then you have a sense of what memes are. (And by the way, thinking about memes is one good way to start getting a sense of why informational cascades are a potential problem in the kind of networked conversational learning that happens, for example, in a blogging community. You could argue that an “idea virus” is either a cause or a manifestation of an informational cascade.) To see an example of somebody using the “meme”…er…meme productively, see this oldie but goodie post from the Truth Laid Bear weblog.
