Related papers: Cultural evolution and personalization
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
This article is a presentation of specific recent results describing scaling limits of individual-based models. Thanks to them, we wish to relate the time-scales typical of demographic dynamics and natural selection to the parameters of the…
Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…
To contribute to understanding of information economies of daily life, this paper explores over the past millennium given names of a large number of persons. Analysts have long both condemned and praised mass media as a source of common…
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…
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…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
To answer questions about racial inequality and fairness, we often need a way to infer race and ethnicity from names. One way to infer race and ethnicity from names is by relying on the Census Bureau's list of popular last names. The list,…
Reproductive success and survival are influenced by wealth in human populations. Wealth is transmitted to offsprings and strategies of transmission vary over time and among populations, the main variation being how equally wealth is…
Globalization and the world wide web has resulted in academia and science being an international and multicultural community forged by researchers and scientists with different ethnicities. How ethnicity shapes the evolution of membership,…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Although cumulative family name distributions in many countries exhibit power-law forms, there also exist counterexamples. The origin of different family name distributions across countries is discussed analytically in the framework of a…
Bibliographic data is a rich source of information that goes beyond the use cases of location and citation -- it also encodes both cultural and technological context. For most of its existence, the scholarly record has changed slowly and…
Gender information is no longer a mandatory input when registering for an account at many leading Internet companies. However, prediction of demographic information such as gender and age remains an important task, especially in…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
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…
We study the evolution of preferences in multi-population settings that allow matches across distinct populations. Each individual has subjective preferences over potential outcomes, and chooses a best response based on his preferences and…