his work on how social networks shape outbreaks of gonorrhoea and
other STDs. For a technical overview of disease modelling,
Modelling Infectious Diseases in Humans and Animals (Princeton
University Press, 2007) by Matt Keeling and Pej Rohani had been an
essential textbook for me ever since I first read it as an
undergraduate.
Andy Haldane’s speech ‘Rethinking the Financial Network’ (Bank
of England transcript, 2009) was a timely discussion of the links
between ecology, epidemiology and financial markets. His later
paper with Robert May, ‘Systemic risk in banking ecosystems’
(Nature, 2011), expanded on these ideas with more technical details.
Chapter 3
Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How
They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler
(HarperPress, 2011) describes research into dynamics of social
networks, including their studies on the spread of obesity and other
characteristics. Their subsequent paper ‘Social contagion theory:
examining dynamic social networks and human behavior’ (Statistics
in Medicine, 2013) discusses the criticisms of their research, and the
technical challenges involved in estimating social contagion. Damon
Centola’s book How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex
Contagions (Princeton University Press, 2018) covers his work on
complex contagion, as well as other insights from large-scale studies
of behaviour. ‘Randomized experiments to detect and estimate social
influence in networks’ by Sean Taylor and Dean Eckles (Complex
Spreading Phenomena in Social Systems, 2018) is a useful technical
review of approaches for studying social contagion.
Further insights from the NATSAL studies can be found in David
Spiegelhalter’s book Sex by Numbers: What Statistics Can Tell Us
About Sexual Behaviour (Wellcome Collection, 2015). ‘Culture and
cultural evolution in birds: a review of the evidence’ by Lucy Aplin
(Animal Behaviour, 2019) provides an overview of cultural
development in animals, with a focus on birds.
Chapter 4