Related papers: Some Properties of Transforms in Culture Theory
Understanding the mechanisms underlying the formation of cultural traits, such as preferences, opinions and beliefs is an open challenge. Trait formation is intimately connected to cultural dynamics, which has been the focus of a variety of…
The Birkhoff's theorem states that any doubly stochastic matrix lies inside a convex polytope with the permutation matrices at the corners. It can be proven that a similar theorem holds for unitary matrices with equal line sums for prime…
A stochastic model for the evolution of a growing population is proposed, in order to explain empirical power-law distributions in the frequency of family names as a function of the family size. Preliminary results show that the predicted…
Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…
Many models of population dynamics are formulated as deterministic iterated maps although real populations are stochastic. This is justifiable in the limit of large population sizes, as the stochastic fluctuations are negligible then.…
Using the frequency of keywords is a classic approach in the formal analysis of text, but has the drawback of glossing over the relationality of word meanings. Word embedding models overcome this problem by constructing a standardized and…
In this note we present two types of biological models which have interesting ergodic and chaotic properties. The first type are one-dimensional transformations, like a logistic map, which are used to describe the change in population size…
Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
This dissertation presents a multifaceted look into the structural decomposition of permutation classes. The theory of permutation patterns is a rich and varied field, and is a prime example of how an accessible and intuitive definition…
Decision procedures aggregating the preferences of multiple agents can produce cycles and hence outcomes which have been described heuristically as `chaotic'. We make this description precise by constructing an explicit dynamical system…
It is important to be clear as to whether a theory such as evolutionary archaeology pertains to biological evolution, in which acquired change is obliterated at the end of each generation, or cultural change, in which acquired change is…
The classic Birkhoff- von Neumann theorem states that the set of doubly stochastic matrices is the convex hull of the permutation matrices. In this paper, we study a generalisation of this theorem in the type $II_1$ setting. Namely, we…
Evolution by Natural Selection is a process by which progeny inherit some properties from their progenitors with small variation. These properties are subject to Natural Selection and are called adaptive traits and carriers of the latter…
Recently, it has been emphasized that the possibility theory framework allows us to distinguish between i) what is possible because it is not ruled out by the available knowledge, and ii) what is possible for sure. This distinction may be…
Many cultural traits characterizing intelligent behaviors are now thought to be transmitted through statistical learning, motivating us to study its effects on cultural evolution. We conduct a large-scale music data analysis and observe…
We provide elementary proofs of several results concerning the possible outcomes arising from a fixed profile within the class of positional voting systems. Our arguments enable a simple and explicit construction of paradoxical profiles,…
A quantitative understanding of societies requires useful combinations of empirical data and mathematical models. Models of cultural dynamics aim at explaining the emergence of culturally homogeneous groups through social influence.…