Related papers: Cultural Evolution Entails (Creativity Entails (Co…
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…
This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons…
We explore the emergence of cooperation in the framework of evolutionary game theory. First we introduce the cooperation problem in a novel way that we believe it have important consequences in how problem is addressed. Then we present a…
It is proposed that the ability of humans to flourish in diverse environments and evolve complex cultures reflects the following two underlying cognitive transitions. The transition from the coarse-grained associative memory of Homo habilis…
Creativity, defined as the tendency to generate or recognize new ideas or alternatives and to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, is too vast a horizon to be summed up in such a simple sentence. The extreme abstractness…
Formal modelling provides a toolkit for understanding cultural dynamics, from individual decisions to recurring patterns of change. This chapter explains what models are and why they matter. Using a precise, shared language, they aid…
We outline the rationale and preliminary results of using the State Context Property (SCOP) formalism, originally developed as a generalization of quantum mechanics, to describe the contextual manner in which concepts are evoked, used, and…
Even this saying itself is a variant of a similar statement attributed to Bernard of Chartres in the 12th Century, and inspired the title for a book by Steven Hawking and an album by Oasis. Creative ideas beget other creative ideas and, as…
Autocatalytic networks have been used to model the emergence of self-organizing structure capable of sustaining life and undergoing biological evolution. Here, we model the emergence of cognitive structure capable of undergoing cultural…
We present an individual based model of cultural evolution, where interacting agents are coded by binary strings standing for strategies for action, blueprints for products or attitudes and beliefs. The model is patterned on an established…
We explore the evolution of cooperation in the framework of the evolutionary game theory using the prisoner's dilemma as metaphor of the problem. We present a minimal model taking into account the growing process of the systems and…
The evolution and function of imitation have always been placed within the confines of animal learning and associated with its crucial role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Can imitation evolve as a form of phenotypic…
Purpose and meaning are necessary concepts for understanding mind and culture, but appear to be absent from the physical world and are not part of the explanatory framework of the natural sciences. Understanding how meaning (in the broad…
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…
One can study communications by using Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication. In social communications, however, the channels are not "fixed", but themselves subject to change. Communication systems change by communicating…
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…
Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…
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…
In quantum mechanics, outcomes of measurements on a state have a probabilistic interpretation while the evolution of the state is treated deterministically. Here we show that one can also treat the evolution as being probabilistic in nature…
Evolution by natural selection can be seen an algorithm for generating creative solutions to difficult problems. More precisely, evolution by natural selection is a class of algorithms that share a set of properties. The question we address…