Social Animals, Social Revolutions and Social Networks

We like to think of social networks as contemporary phenomena. But before Facebook, individuals organized themselves in social networks; before Twitter, revolutionaries used media to communicate and coordinate their messages. In fact, even animal societies are networked. Do all these social networks share certain properties? What can we learn by comparing them? These are some of the questions we will ask in this course, as we traverse the natural world and past societies before taking a fresh look at our modern social networks.