Is free will real? The constraints imposed on individuals by their social networks

The structure of animal societies impacts components of fitness, including survival, sexual selection, and reproductive success. Social structure is also instrumental to understanding of disease and cultural transmission, and the evolution of cooperation. Recent studies of animal sociality found multiple factors affecting social structure, but most of them used static social networks, ignoring temporal dynamics. I will present a general model of the dynamics of animal social networks, based on demographic stochasticity and social inheritance. This model can reconstruct the observed networks of multiple species. The model also suggests that heritability of social traits, and assortativity, the tendency to connect to similar individuals, can be explained as byproducts of social inheritance. I will show that the model assumptions hold using a long-term study of spotted hyenas. I will discuss the constraints imposed on individuals by their social networks. These constraints shed light on factors limiting the free behavior of individuals in animal societies.