The explanation for the complex, multi-scale structure of biological and social systems lies in their manipulation of space and time to reduce uncertainty about the future

Biological systems – from cells to tissues to individuals to societies – are hierarchically organized (e.g. Feldman & Eschel, 1982; Buss 1987; Smith & Szathmáry, 1998; Valentine & May, 1996; Michod, 2000; Frank, 2003). To many, hierarchical organization suggests the nesting of components or individuals into groups, with these groups aggregating into yet larger groups. But this view – at least superficially – privileges space and matter over time and information. Many types of neural coding, for example, require averaging or summing over neural firing rates. The neurons’ spatial location – that they are in proximity – is, of course, important, but at least as important to the encoding The explanation for the complex, multi-scale structure of biological and social systems lies in their manipulation of space and time to reduce uncertainty about the future.is their behavior in time. Likewise, in some monkey societies, as I will discuss in detail later in this review, individuals estimate the future cost of social interaction by encoding the average outcome of past interactions in special signals and then summing over these signals. In both examples, information from events distributed in time as well as space (Figure 1) is captured with encodings that are used to control some behavioral output. My collaborators and I in the Center for Complexity & Collective Computation are exploring the idea that hierarchical organization at its core is a nesting of these kinds of functional encodings.