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Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
This paper provides a research-based framework for promoting institutional change in higher education. To date, most educational change efforts have focused on relatively narrow subsets of the university system (e.g., faculty teaching…
Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
The theory of natural selection cannot describe how early life evolved, in part because acquired characteristics are passed on through horizontal exchange. It has been proposed that culture, like life, began with the emergence of…
Understanding how styles differ across languages is advantageous for training both humans and computers to generate culturally appropriate text. We introduce an explanation framework to extract stylistic differences from multilingual LMs…
Categories provide a coarse grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature, or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and…
Cumulative cultural evolution is what made humanity to thrive in various ecological and demographic environments. Solutions to the tasks that humans needed to solve could be mapped onto a task space which could take the form of either…
We consider the problem of the evolution of a code within a structured population of agents. The agents try to maximise their information about their environment by acquiring information from the outputs of other agents in the population. A…
Data science has emerged from the proliferation of digital data, coupled with advances in algorithms, software and hardware (e.g., GPU computing). Innovations in structural biology have been driven by similar factors, spurring us to ask:…
As a co-author of the paper Theoretical understanding of evolutionary dynamics on inhomogeneous networks, I would like to express my disagreement with the conclusion of the paper. In this response, I present a thorough examination of the…
Networks form the backbone of many complex systems, ranging from the Internet to human societies. Accordingly, not only is the range of our interactions limited and thus best described and modeled by networks, it is also a fact that the…
Over the next few years, society as a whole will need to address what core values it wishes to protect when dealing with technology. Anthropology, a field dedicated to the very notion of what it means to be human, can provide some…
Cooperation and competition coexist and coevolve in natural and social systems. Cooperation generates resources, which in turn, drive non-cooperative competition to secure individual shares. How this complex interplay between cooperation…
The historical interplay between societies are governed by many factors, including in particular spreading of languages, religion and other symbolic traits. Cultural development, in turn, is coupled to emergence and maintenance of…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
Stars strongly impact their environment, and shape structures on all scales throughout the universe, in a process known as ``feedback''. Due to the complexity of both stellar evolution and the physics of larger astrophysical structures,…
Language is one of the most important aspects of human cognition; it represents the way we think, act and communicate with each other. Each language has its own history, background, and form. A language represents a lot of important…
Evolution is the principal theoretical framework in Pacific Island archaeology. Progressive cultural evolutionary stages, particularly the chiefdom, provided the earliest framework. These ideas were increasingly linked to islands as…
The adaptation process of a species to a new environment is a significant area of study in biology. As part of natural selection, adaptation is a mutation process which improves survival skills and reproductive functions of species. Here,…