"The book explores the origins of social behavior in an adaptive system. This original research uses a combination of ideas from biology, computation, game theory, mathematics, and the social sciences to explore what it takes for an adaptive system of simple agents to become social (and, in the process, even what it means for a system to be social in the first place). By evolving a set of interacting automata (simple computing machines), we find that there are critical thresholds in computational ability, agent interactivity, and the environment that allow such systems to move from asocial to social behavior"--.