Related papers: Cultural Evolution Entails (Creativity Entails (Co…
Creativity, or the ability to produce new useful ideas, is commonly associated to the human being; but there are many other examples in nature where this phenomenon can be observed. Inspired by this fact, in engineering and particularly in…
The sociotechnological system is a system constituted of human individuals and their artifacts: technological artifacts, institutions, conceptual and representational systems, worldviews, knowledge systems, culture and the whole biosphere…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
Creative thought is conventionally believed to involve searching memory and generating multiple independent candidate ideas followed by selection and refinement of the most promising. Honing theory, which grew out of the quantum approach to…
We argue that traditional Western science cannot adequately describe sports and other types of human behavior. Then we make an argument why a complex adaptive systems approach has the potential to provide the foundation for such a theory.…
Vision systems in nature show remarkable diversity, from simple light-sensitive patches to complex camera eyes with lenses. While natural selection has produced these eyes through countless mutations over millions of years, they represent…
The classical "game of life" (GOL) due to Conway is a famous mathematical game constructed as a two-dimensional cellular automaton in which each cell is either alive or dead. A set of evolutionary rules determines whether a cell dies,…
This article discusses open scientific challenges for understanding development and evolution of speech forms, as a commentary to Moulin-Frier et al. (Moulin-Frier et al., 2015). Based on the analysis of mathematical models of the origins…
The paper uses the SCOP theory of concepts to model the role of environmental context on three levels of entrepreneurial opportunity: idea generation, idea development, and entrepreneurial decision. The role of contextual-fit in the…
Culture involves the origination and transmission of ideas, but the conditions in which culture can emerge and evolve are unclear. We constructed and studied a highly simplified neural-network model of these processes. In this model ideas…
Neural codes appear efficient. Naturally, neuroscientists contend that an efficient process is responsible for generating efficient codes. They argue that natural selection is the efficient process that generates those codes. Although…
This paper states the case for applying the conceptual and analytic tools associated with the study of entropy in physical systems to cognition, focusing on creative cognition. It is proposed that minds modify their contents and adapt to…
Discursive knowledge emerges as codification in flows of communication. The flows of communication are constrained and enabled by networks of communications as their historical manifestations at each moment of time. New publications modify…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
Dunnell's (1989) explanation for cultural elaboration proposed that elaboration could be a consequence of selection within uncertain environments. He developed the theory to the extent that it performed well explaining the distribution of…
The human cognitive system is a remarkable exemplar of a general intelligent system whose competence is not confined to a specific problem domain. Evidently, general cognitive competences are a product of a prolonged and complex process of…
There is surely some truth to the notion that culture evolves, but the Darwinian view of culture is trivial. Gabora does two things in this paper. First, she levels a reasoned and devastating attack on the adequacy of a Darwinian theory of…
We advance a hypothesis that creativity has evolved with evolution of internal representations, possibly from amniotes to primates, and further in human cultural evolution. Representations separated sensing from acting and gave "internal…
Understanding how cognitive and social mechanisms shape the evolution of complex artifacts such as songs is central to cultural evolution research. Social network topology (what artifacts are available?), selection (which are chosen?), and…
Status signaling drives human behavior and the allocation of scarce resources such as mating opportunities, yet the generative mechanisms governing how specific goods, signals, or behaviors acquire prestige remain a puzzle. Classical…