What comes to mind when I read this is some recent work titled, "Growing Neural Cellular Automata". There's a really cool demo at https://distill.pub/2020/growi

What comes to mind when I read this is some recent work titled, "Growing Neural Cellular Automata". There's a really cool demo at https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ where it will grow a gecko and you can blast parts of it and it will grow back. It's fairly resilient to single blasts just about anywhere, tail, head, body and seems to be ok with two blasts in succession but you get a little more aggressive with the damage and you reach a point where it can't recover and if you get it just right it withers away and dies. I feel like societies are like this. They're resilient. They can take damage to even seemingly vital places and recover but given enough blows to just the right places and they will die.