Related papers: The Relationship between Creativity, Imitation, an…
Excess individual creativity can be detrimental to society because creators invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Moreover, a proportion of individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to creativity. In a social group it is not necessary for all members to be creative to benefit from creativity; some merely imitate or enjoy the fruits of others' creative efforts. What proportion…
Although creativity is encouraged in the abstract it is often discouraged in educational and workplace settings. Using an agent-based model of cultural evolution, we investigated the idea that tempering the novelty-generating effects of…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
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…
EVOC (for EVOlution of Culture) is a computer model of culture that enables us to investigate how various factors such as barriers to cultural diffusion, the presence and choice of leaders, or changes in the ratio of innovation to imitation…
Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary…
In a society, a proportion of the individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative themselves by copying the creators. This paper uses an agent-based model of cultural evolution to investigate how society is affected by…
Human culture is uniquely cumulative and open-ended. Using a computational model of cultural evolution in which neural network based agents evolve ideas for actions through invention and imitation, we tested the hypothesis that this is due…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Research in cultural evolution aims at providing causal explanations for the change of culture over time. Over the past decades, this field has generated an important body of knowledge, using experimental, historical, and computational…
This chapter synthesizes evidence from cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychological studies, and computational models for a complex systems inspired theory of creativity, and its role in cultural evolution. Creativity…
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…
Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…
The remarkable ecological success of humans is often attributed to our ability to develop complex cultural artefacts that enable us to cope with environmental challenges. The evolution of complex culture (cumulative cultural evolution) is…
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems attempt to imitate human behavior. How well they do this imitation is often used to assess their utility and to attribute human-like (or artificial) intelligence to them. However, most work on AI refers…
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 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…
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…