Collective social niche construction shaping adaptive social networks

Understanding how social networks form and change is key to explaining the adaptability of human and nonhuman societies. Collective social niche construction describes how individuals actively shape their social environment through interactions, generating network structures that influence cooperation, pathogen transmission, and information flow. Recent advances reveal that network adaptability emerges through distinct mechanisms: self-organisation and phase transitions enable rapid topological changes in response to environmental pressures, while behavioural flexibility-central to the Cumulative Cultural Brain Hypothesis-supports enhanced social learning and cultural accumulation in high-intelligence species. Both pathways exemplify how feedback loops between individual strategies and emergent network properties generate adaptive, resilient social structures. This perspective positions social networks as dynamic biological structures shaped by plasticity at multiple hierarchical levels.