Related papers: An Evolutionary Framework for Culture: Selectionis…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…
Situations where individuals have to contribute to joint efforts or share scarce resources are ubiquitous. Yet, without proper mechanisms to ensure cooperation, the evolutionary pressure to maximize individual success tends to create a…
One of the most interesting scientific challenges nowadays deals with the analysis and the understanding of complex networks' dynamics. A major issue is the definition of new frameworks for the exploration of the dynamics at play in real…
The replicator-mutator dynamic was originally derived to model the evolution of language, and since the model was derived in such a general manner, it has been applied to the dynamics of social behavior and decision making in multi-agent…
"Evolution behaves like a tinkerer" (Francois Jacob, Science, 1977). Software systems provide a unique opportunity to understand biological processes using concepts from network theory. The Debian GNU/Linux operating system allows us to…
This article considers a mechanism to explain the emergence and evolution of social cooperation. Selfish individuals tend to benefit themselves, which makes it hard for the maintenance of cooperation between unrelated individuals. We…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
Ensemble learning has gained success in machine learning with major advantages over other learning methods. Bagging is a prominent ensemble learning method that creates subgroups of data, known as bags, that are trained by individual…
Economists model knowledge use and acquisition as a cause-and-effect calculus associating observations made by a decision-maker about their world with possible underlying causes. Knowledge models are well-established for static contexts,…
Decision-making societies may vary in their level of cooperation and degree of conservatism, both of which influence their overall performance. Moreover, these factors are not fixed -- they can change based on the decisions agents in the…
We propose a mathematical framework for natural selection in finite populations. Traditionally, many of the selection-based processes used to describe cultural and genetic evolution (such as imitation and birth-death models) have been…
We dwell upon the physicist's conception of `life' since Schroedinger and Wigner through to the modern-day language of living systems in the light of quantum information. We discuss some basic features of a living system such as ordinary…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
It is well-known that population structure is a catalyst for the evolution of cooperation since individuals can reciprocate with their neighbors through local interactions defined by network structures. Previous research typically relies on…
Holland's (1975) genetic algorithm is a minimal computer model of natural selection that made it possible to investigate the effect of manipulating specific parameters on the evolutionary process. If culture is, like biology, a form of…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
Experimental studies have shown the ubiquity of altruistic behavior in human societies. The social structure is a fundamental ingredient to understand the degree of altruism displayed by the members of a society, in contrast to…
The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be" (1989, p.1). The study and pursuit of…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…