Related papers: Five clarifications about cultural evolution
Motivated by present activities in (statistical) physics directed towards biological evolution, we review the interplay of three evolutionary forces: mutation, selection, and genetic drift. The review addresses itself to physicists and…
As AI art generation becomes increasingly sophisticated, HCI research has focused primarily on questions of detection, authenticity, and automation. This paper argues that such approaches fundamentally misunderstand how artistic value…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
The question that how cultural variation emerges has drawn lots of interest in sociological inquiry. Sociologists predominantly study such variation through the lens of social contagion, which mostly attributes cultural variation to the…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
This paper explains in layperson's terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the hypothesis that culture evolves more effectively when novelty-generating creative processes are tempered by imitation processes that preserve…
Humans' distinctive role in the world can largely be attributed to our capacity for iterated learning, a process by which knowledge is expanded and refined over generations. A range of theories seek to explain why humans are so adept at…
Axelrod's model for culture dissemination offers a nontrivial answer to the question of why there is cultural diversity given that people's beliefs have a tendency to become more similar to each other's as people interact repeatedly. The…
At the fundamental conceptual level, two alternatives have traditionally been considered for how mutations arise and how evolution happens: 1) random mutation and natural selection, and 2) Lamarckism. Recently, the theory of…
This article introduces Recursivism as a conceptual framework for analyzing contemporary artistic practices in the age of artificial intelligence. While recursion is precisely defined in mathematics and computer science, it has not…
Biologists rely heavily on the language of information, coding, and transmission that is commonplace in the field of information theory as developed by Claude Shannon, but there is open debate about whether such language is anything more…
Reproducibility is a confused terminology. In this paper, I take a fundamental view on reproducibility rooted in the scientific method. The scientific method is analysed and characterised in order to develop the terminology required to…
Natural revision seems so natural: it changes beliefs as little as possible to incorporate new information. Yet, some counterexamples show it wrong. It is so conservative that it never fully believes. It only believes in the current…
The evolution of genetic systems has been analyzed through the use of modifier gene models, in which a neutral gene is posited to control the transmission of other genes under selection. Analysis of modifier gene models has found the…
Regularization occurs when the output a learner produces is less variable than the linguistic data they observed. In an artificial language learning experiment, we show that there exist at least two independent sources of regularization…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Controlled generation refers to the problem of creating text that contains stylistic or semantic attributes of interest. Many approaches reduce this problem to training a predictor of the desired attribute. For example, researchers hoping…
Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…
Understanding how knowledge is created and propagates within groups is crucial to explain how human populations have evolved through time. Anthropologists have relied on different theoretical models to address this question. In this work,…