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This is a call for papers that should contribute to the unification of behavioral sciences and team management, focusing on the biological origin of cooperation and swarm intelligence, moving from biology to psychology and from sociology to political science, with the help of the theoretical tools of complex networks. This issue should shed light into the origin of ergodicity breaking and contribute to establishing a connection, still lacking theoretical support, between complexity properties that are expected to be correlated. Examples are: non-Poisson renewal events and multi-fractality; complexity matching and chaos synchronization; criticality and extended criticality of small size systems. Although the emphasis is on systems of small size, and especially on the search of the size maximizing both information transport and cooperation emergence, special attention will be devoted to the interaction between small groups and their larger societies.

This paper is an outgrowth of the discussions held during the 2005 Denton Workshop, In Search of a Theory of Complexity. The workshop title captures the intent of the scientists who had come from Europe, the middle east and the United States to discuss the possibility that recent advances in statistical physics might provide a perspective that could guide us in constructing a theory of complexity. In this first paper of the proceedings we attempt to summarize the concepts introduced in the various debates and to draw some conclusions. But we caution the reader that these conclusions are our own and are not necessarily shared by the other participants of the workshop.

Since ancient times, people have lived in a hierarchical society. In this paper, we consider a simple hierarchical society with disadvantaged group and powerful group(i.e. the binary social status). The ability for powerful group is reflected to be a punisher, and this privilege cannot be imitated by the disadvantaged agent. On this base, the theory of asymmetric evolutionary game with hierarchical punishment is extend. And its impact on the evolution of cooperation is studied. The simulation results show that the hierarchical punishment with square lattices connection can promote the cooperation. Specifically, there is a reverse phenomenon of the cooperation for different social fines with the increasing temptation. Interestingly, the living cooperators survive not only by forming clusters, but also by attaching to the punishers. There is an optimal initial fraction of the powerful group for the excitation of cooperation. The cooperation on the island of powerful agents reveal that the influence range of the punitive right is limited, but the powerful agent squint towards this special right. Taken together, we deeply study the mechanism of the hierarchical punishment to the cooperation. The new recognitions may provide some novel perspectives for engineering better social systems.