Related papers: A model for the evolutionary diversification of re…

Religions are among the most consequential social institutions, shaping collective identities, moral norms, and political organization across societies and historical periods. Nevertheless, despite extensive scholarship describing…

The profound impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on biology has led to the acceptance of the theory in many complex systems that lie well beyond its original domain. Culture is one example that also exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary…

Epidemic models study the spread of an undesired agent through a population, be it infectious diseases through a country, misinformation in online social media, or pests infesting a region. In combating these epidemics, we rely neither on…

Religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of populations. All religions may evolve in their beliefs and adapt to the society developments. A religion is a social variable, like a language or wealth, to be studied like…

EVOC (for EVOlution of Culture) is a computer model of culture that enables us to investigate how various factors such as barriers to cultural diffusion, the presence and choice of leaders, or changes in the ratio of innovation to imitation…

(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…

Risk-driven behavior provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the…

Mathematical disease modelling has long operated under the assumption that any one infectious disease is caused by one transmissible pathogen spreading among a population. This paradigm has been useful in simplifying the biological reality…

We present a model for evolving agents using both genetic and cultural inheritance mechanisms. Within each agent our model maintains two distinct information stores we call the genome and the memome. Processes of adaptation are modeled as…

Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in…

The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…

In ecology, species can mitigate their extinction risks in uncertain environments by diversifying individual phenotypes. This observation is quantified by the theory of bet-hedging, which provides a reason for the degree of phenotypic…

Epidemic disease spreading is conventionally often modelled and analyzed by means of rate and diffusion equations, following the paradigms of well-controlled chemical reactions and diffusive dynamics in a test tube. Yet, serious worries…

How self-organization leads to the emergence of structure in social populations remains a fascinating and open question in the study of complex systems. One frequently observed structure that emerges again and again across systems is that…

A common theme among the proposed models for network epidemics is the assumption that the propagating object, i.e., a virus or a piece of information, is transferred across the nodes without going through any modification or evolution.…

In an increasingly interconnected world, a key scientific challenge is to examine mechanisms that lead to the widespread propagation of contagions, such as misinformation and pathogens, and identify risk factors that can trigger large-scale…

Models are often employed to integrate knowledge about epidemics across scales and simulate disease dynamics. While these approaches have played a central role in studying the mechanics underlying epidemics, we lack ways to reliably predict…

Motile organisms can form stable agglomerates such as cities or colonies. In the outbreak of a highly contagious disease, the control of large-scale epidemic spread depends on factors like the number and size of agglomerates, travel rate…

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?…

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…