Related papers: An Evolutionary Framework for Culture: Selectionis…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
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.…
Research in cultural evolution aims at providing causal explanations for the change of culture over time. Over the past decades, this field has generated an important body of knowledge, using experimental, historical, and computational…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
To analyze the evolutionary emergence of structural complexity in physical processes we introduce a general, but tractable, model of objects that interact to produce new objects. Since the objects--\emph{$epsilon$-machines}--have well…
The evolution and function of imitation have always been placed within the confines of animal learning and associated with its crucial role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Can imitation evolve as a form of phenotypic…
The Weismann barrier, or the impossibility of inheritance of acquired traits, comprises a foundation of modern biology, and it has been a major obstacle in establishing the connection between evolution and ontogenesis. We propose the…
Feedbacks between evolution and ecology are ubiquitous, with ecological interactions determining which mutants are successful, and these mutants in turn modifying community structure. We study the evolutionary dynamics of several ecological…
Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
In this paper we consider a microscopic model of a simple ecosystem. The basic ingredients of this model are individuals, and both the phenotypic and genotypic levels are taken in account. The model is based on a long range cellular…
We propose, in this article, an analysis of the Darwin's approach to sociality. Sociality is perfectly integrated into the selective model, and is caused by the same process as struggle for existence. Thus, the selective process does not…
We introduce a mathematical model that combines the concepts of complex contagion with payoff-biased imitation, to describe how social behaviors spread through a population. Traditional models of social learning by imitation are based on…
Complex networks serve as abstract models for understanding real-world complex systems and provide frameworks for studying structured dynamical systems. This article addresses limitations in current studies on the exploration of individual…
We introduce a novel evolutionary algorithm (EA) with a semantic network-based representation. For enabling this, we establish new formulations of EA variation operators, crossover and mutation, that we adapt to work on semantic networks.…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
The origin of agriculture represents a major evolutionary transition and a paradigmatic example of how complex collective behaviors emerge from simple interactions. Here we introduce an artificial society of reinforcement learning agents…
Levels of sociality in nature vary widely. Some species are solitary; others live in family groups; some form complex multi-family societies. Increased levels of social interaction can allow for the spread of useful innovations and…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of an age-structured population under weak frequency-dependent selection. It turns out that the weak selection is affected in a non-trivial way by the life-history trait. We can disentangle the…
Without contributing, defectors take more benefit from social resources than cooperators which is the reflection of a specific character of individuals. However, natural physical mechanisms of our society promote cooperation. Thus, in the…