Related papers: An Evolutionary Framework for Culture: Selectionis…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
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…
We report a summary of our interdisciplinary research project "Evolutionary Perspective on Collective Decision Making" that was conducted through close collaboration between computational, organizational and social scientists at Binghamton…
The functioning of animal as well as human societies fundamentally relies on cooperation. Yet, defection is often favorable for the selfish individual, and social dilemmas arise. Selection by individuals' fitness, usually the basic driving…
The commentators have brought a wealth of new perspectives to the question of how culture evolves. Each of their diverse disciplines--ranging from psychology to biology to anthropology to economics to engineering--has a valuable…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
The fact that humans cooperate with non-kin in large groups, or with people they will never meet again, is a long-standing evolutionary puzzle with profound implications. Cooperation is linked to altruism, the capacity to perform costly…
Range expansion is a universal process in biological systems, and therefore plays a part in biological evolution. Using a quantitative individual-based method based on the stochastic process, we identify that enhancing the inherent…
The tragedy of the commons (TOC) is a ubiquitous social dilemma witnessed in interactions between a population of living entities and shared resources available to them: The individuals in the population tend to selfishly overexploit a…
Dietrich and Haider (2014) justify their integrative framework for creativity founded on evolutionary theory and prediction research on the grounds that "theories and approaches guiding empirical research on creativity have not been…
Living things, computers, societies, and even books are part of a grand evolutionary struggle to survive. That struggle shapes nature, nations, religions, art, science, and you. What you think, feel, and do is determined by it. Darwinian…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information…
Adapting to task changes without forgetting previous knowledge is a key skill for intelligent systems, and a crucial aspect of lifelong learning. Swarm controllers, however, are typically designed for specific tasks, lacking the ability to…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
The continuity of life and its evolution, we proposed, emerge from an interactive group process manifested in networks of interaction. We term this process \textit{survival-of-the-fitted}. Here, we reason that survival of the fitted results…
Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…
Understanding how cognitive and social mechanisms shape the evolution of complex artifacts such as songs is central to cultural evolution research. Social network topology (what artifacts are available?), selection (which are chosen?), and…