Evolutionary Psychology
Understanding evolutionary strategies is essential to designers of stigmergic systems. Here is an article written by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby for the Center for Evolutionary Biolgy where they are used to throw new light on psychology:
Evolutionary Psychology: a primer
The article begins:
" Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.
In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics, and opening up new ones".