Related papers: Five clarifications about cultural evolution
Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However, a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the…
The profound impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on biology has led to the acceptance of the theory in many complex systems that lie well beyond its original domain. Culture is one example that also exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary…
Dietrich and Haider (2014) justify their integrative framework for creativity founded on evolutionary theory and prediction research on the grounds that "theories and approaches guiding empirical research on creativity have not been…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
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…
Intelligent machines with superhuman capabilities have the potential to uncover problem-solving strategies beyond human discovery. Emerging evidence from competitive gameplay, such as Go and chess, demonstrates that AI systems are evolving…
Simonton is attempting to salvage the Blind Variation Selective Retention theory of creativity (often referred to as the Darwinian theory of creativity) by dissociating it from Darwinism. This is a necessary move for complex reasons…
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…
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 do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…
The theory of interaction-based evolution argues that, at the most basic level of analysis, there is a third alternative for how adaptive evolution works besides a) accidental mutation and natural selection and b) Lamarckism, namely, c)…
A defining feature of human culture is that knowledge and technology continually improve over time. Such cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) probably depends far more heavily on how reliably information is preserved than on how efficiently…
Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we…
Jerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can…
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…
The ideas that we forge creatively as individuals and groups build on one another in a manner that is cumulative and adaptive, forming open-ended lineages across space and time. Thus, human culture is believed to evolve. The pervasiveness…
The commentators have brought a wealth of new perspectives to the question of how culture evolves. Each of their diverse disciplines--ranging from psychology to biology to anthropology to economics to engineering--has a valuable…
The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of machine culture, culture mediated or generated by…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…