Related papers: The Evolution of Communication Systems
A major obstacle in analyzing the evolution of information exchange and processing is our insufficient understanding of the underlying signaling and decision-making biological mechanisms. For instance, it is unclear why are humans unique in…
Luhmann (1984) defined society as a communication system which is structurally coupled to, but not an aggregate of, human action systems. The communication system is then considered as self-organizing ("autopoietic"), as are human actors.…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
Actors are embedded in networks of communication: the relations of the actors can be represented as the rows of a matrix, while the column vectors represent their communications. The two systems are structurally coupled in the co-variation:…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
A variety of idealized models of communication systems exist, and all may have something in common. Starting with Shannons communication model and ending with the OSI model, this paper presents progressively more advanced forms of modeling…
Prigogine and Stengers (1988) have pointed to the centrality of the concepts of "time and eternity" for the cosmology contained in Newtonian physics, but they have not addressed this issue beyond the domain of physics. The construction of…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
Discursive knowledge emerges as codification in flows of communication. The flows of communication are constrained and enabled by networks of communications as their historical manifestations at each moment of time. New publications modify…
In social networks, individuals constantly drop ties and replace them by new ones in a highly unpredictable fashion. This highly dynamical nature of social ties has important implications for processes such as the spread of information or…
Shannon's mathematical theory of communication defines fundamental limits on how much information can be transmitted between the different components of any man-made or biological system. This paper is an informal but rigorous introduction…
The co-authorship network of scientists represents a prototype of complex evolving networks. By mapping the electronic database containing all relevant journals in mathematics and neuro-science for an eight-year period (1991-98), we infer…
Despite the fact that Shannon and Weaver's Mathematical Theory of Communication was published over 70 years ago, all communication systems continue to operate at the first of three levels defined in this theory: the technical level. In this…
How much information is transmitted when animals use emotions to communicate? It is clear that emotions are used as communication systems in humans and other species. The quantitative theory of emotion information presented here is based on…
The rich set of interactions between individuals in the society results in complex community structure, capturing highly connected circles of friends, families, or professional cliques in a social network. Thanks to frequent changes in the…
The study of inter-human communication requires a more complex framework than Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication because "information" is defined in the latter case as meaningless uncertainty. Assuming that meaning cannot…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
Biological organisms adapt to changes by processing informations from different sources, most notably from their ancestors and from their environment. We review an approach to quantify these informations by analyzing mathematical models of…
Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that…
A theory of citations should not consider cited and/or citing agents as its sole subject of study. One is able to study also the dynamics in the networks of communications. While communicating agents (e.g., authors, laboratories, journals)…