Organization of networks with tagged nodes and biased links: a priori distinct communities. The case of Intelligent Design Proponents and Darwinian Evolution Defenders

TL;DR

This paper analyzes networks with distinct communities, focusing on the structure and interactions of pro-intelligent design and Darwinian evolution advocates using directed, tagged networks and various structural coefficients.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized framework for analyzing biased, directed networks with tagged nodes, applying it to ideological communities and identifying key structural features.

Findings

Distinct community structures can be characterized by degree distributions and clustering coefficients.

Inter-community connections reveal opinion leaders and rivals within ideological networks.

Structural coefficients help differentiate roles and relationships in opinion formation networks.

Abstract

Among topics of opinion formation it is of interest to observe the characteristics of networks with a priori distinct communities. As an illustration, we report on the citation network(s) unfolded in the recent decades through web available works belonging to selected members of the Neocreationist and Intelligent Design Proponents (IDP) and the Darwinian Evolution Defenders (DED) communities. An adjacency matrix of tagged nodes is first constructed; it is not symmetric. A generalization of considerations pertaining to the case of networks with biased links, directed or undirected, is thus presented. The main characteristic coefficients describing the structure of such partially directed networks with tagged nodes are outlined. The structural features are discussed searching for statistical aspects, equivalence or not of subnetworks through the degree distributions, each network assortativity, the global and local clustering coefficients and the Average Overlap Indices. The various closed and open triangles made from nodes, moreover distinguishing the community, are especially listed to calculate the clustering characteristics. The distribution of elements in the rectangular submatrices are specially examined since they represent inter-community connexions. The emphasis being on distinguishing the number of vertices belonging to a given community. Using such informations one can distinguish between opinion leaders, followers and main rivals and briefly interpret their relationships through psychological-like conditions intrinsic to behavior rules in either community. Considerations on other controversy cases with similar social constraints are outlined, as well as suggestions on further, more general, work deduced from our observations on such networks.