Alliance formation

Alliance formation top image

My first model working as a Research Assistant with Sergey Gavrilets is an attempt to explain the transition of hierarchical societies in primates to egalitarian regimes in early humans.

This article was published in the journal PLoS ONE, an open access online journal of the Public Library of Sciences. The article was featured on a number of science blogs:

The main idea behind this work is the so called social brain hypothesis also called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis which states that htere is a need to cooperate to have access to the best resources (food, space, mates, etc.), and thus individuals with higher cognitive abilities form larger, more stable alliances. These alliances are ultimately comprising the whole population when certain assumptions about cultural inheritance are satisfied.

The exciting part is that this could be the first model that describes a plausible scenario for the known increase in brain size of early humans that is associated with the social shift to an egalitarian regime.

About Me

Edgar Edgar A. Duéñez Guzmán is a Senior Research Engineer at DeepMind. Previously he was at Google, where he developed the first machine learning system to select the index for Image Search. During his academic career, he was a Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Biology at KU Leuven working with Tom Wenseleers in social evolution in microbes;
and a Research Associate at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University working with David Haig in social evolution and imprinting.
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Contact Info

E-mail: eaduenez {at} gmail {dot} com