Related papers: Essential conditions for evolution of communicatio…
The main approach to evaluating communication is by assessing how well it facilitates coordination. If two or more individuals can coordinate through communication, it is generally assumed that they understand one another. We investigate…
Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
Collective decision-making arises from individual agents integrating their own personal observations with information obtained from social partners. In many biological systems that exhibit collective decision-making, the process by which…
We present a model that investigates preference evolution with endogenous matching. In the short run, individuals' subjective preferences influence partner selection and behavior in strategic interactions, which affect their material…
Many biological and social systems show significant levels of collective action. Several cooperation mechanisms have been proposed, yet they have been mostly studied independently. Among these, direct reciprocity supports cooperation on the…
Establishing a communication system is hard because the intended meaning of a signal is unknown to its receiver when first produced, and the signaller also has no idea how that signal will be interpreted. Most theoretical accounts of the…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
This paper I assume that in humans the creation of knowledge depends on a discrete time, or stage, sequential decision-making process subjected to a stochastic, information transmitting environment. For each time-stage, this environment…
How does social complexity depend on population size and cultural transmission? Kinship structures in traditional societies provide a fundamental illustration, where cultural rules between clans determine people's marriage possibilities.…
Accurately determining dependency structure is critical to discovering a system's causal organization. We recently showed that the transfer entropy fails in a key aspect of this---measuring information flow---due to its conflation of dyadic…
We propose a mathematical model for collective sensing in a population growing in a stochastically varying environment. In the population, individuals use an information channel for sensing the environment, and two channels for signal…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
Human communication is commonly represented as a temporal social network, and evaluated in terms of its uniqueness. We propose a set of new entropy-based measures for human communication dynamics represented within the temporal social…
Despite its obvious relevance, meaning has been outside most theoretical approaches to information in biology. As a consequence, functional responses based on an appropriate interpretation of signals has been replaced by a probabilistic…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Global environmental change is affecting species distribution and their interactions with other species. In particular, the main drivers of environmental change strongly affect the strength of interspecific interactions with considerable…
Explaining how competing species coexist remains a central question in ecology. The well-known competitive exclusion principle (CEP) states that two species competing for the same resource cannot stably coexist, and more generally, that the…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…