Related papers: Five clarifications about cultural evolution
The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…
The effects of generative AI are experienced by a broad range of constituencies, but the disciplinary inputs to its development have been surprisingly narrow. Here we present a set of provocations from humanities researchers -- currently…
We explore how ideas from infectious disease and genetics can be used to uncover patterns of cultural inheritance and innovation in a corpus of 591 national constitutions spanning 1789 - 2008. Legal "Ideas" are encoded as "topics" - words…
The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…
We study the population genetics of Evolution in the important special case of weak selection, in which all fitness values are assumed to be close to one another. We show that in this regime natural selection is tantamount to the…
A central goal of evolutionary biology is to explain the origins and distribution of diversity across life. Beyond species or genetic diversity, we also observe diversity in the circuits (genetic or otherwise) underlying complex functional…
We study the asymptotic behavior of deterministic, continuous-time imitation dynamics for population games over networks. The basic assumption of this learning mechanism -- encompassing the replicator dynamics -- is that players belonging…
Evolutionary game dynamics is one of the most fruitful frameworks for studying evolution in different disciplines, from Biology to Economics. Within this context, the approach of choice for many researchers is the so-called replicator…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
We consider two versions of stochastic population models with mutation and selection. The first approach relies on a multitype branching process; here, individuals reproduce and change type (i.e., mutate) independently of each other,…
Cellular automata have been useful artificial models for exploring how relatively simple rules combined with spatial memory can give rise to complex emergent patterns. Moreover, studying the dynamics of how rules emerge under artificial…
Large-scale replication studies like the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P) provide invaluable systematic data on scientific replicability, but most analyses and interpretations of the data fail to agree on the definition of…
We consider biological individuality in terms of information theoretic and graphical principles. Our purpose is to extract through an algorithmic decomposition system-environment boundaries supporting individuality. We infer or detect…
Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…
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…
We study the consequences of introducing individual nonconformity in social interactions, based on Axelrod's model for the dissemination of culture. A constraint on the number of situations in which interaction may take place is introduced…
Human societies around the world interact with each other by developing and maintaining social norms, and it is critically important to understand how such norms emerge and change. In this work, we define an evolutionary game-theoretic…
Natural selection can create information. In particular, because of the action of natural selection, we can often learn something about an environment by examining local organisms, and vice versa. For example, the characteristics of a…
Cultural trends and popularity cycles can be observed all around us, yet our theories of social influence and identity expression do not explain what perpetuates these complex, often unpredictable social dynamics. We propose a theory of…
Consistent confirmations obtained independently of each other lend credibility to a scientific result. We refer to results satisfying this consistency as reproducible and assume that reproducibility is a desirable property of scientific…