Related papers: Divergent Cumulative Cultural Evolution
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…
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…
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a…
We report a summary of our interdisciplinary research project "Evolutionary Perspective on Collective Decision Making" that was conducted through close collaboration between computational, organizational and social scientists at Binghamton…
Knowledge built culturally across generations allows humans to learn far more than an individual could glean from their own experience in a lifetime. Cultural knowledge in turn rests on language: language is the richest record of what…
Cooperation is fundamental to human societies. While several basic theoretical mechanisms underlying its evolution have been established, research addressing more realistic settings remains underdeveloped. Drawing on the hypothesis that…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
Camouflage in nature seems to arise from competition between predator and prey. To survive, predators must find prey, and prey must avoid being found. This work simulates an abstract model of that adversarial relationship. It looks at…
This study explores the application of evolutionary generative algorithms in music production to preserve and enhance human creativity. By integrating human feedback into Differential Evolution algorithms, we produced six songs that were…
Direct reciprocity is a powerful mechanism for evolution of cooperation based on repeated interactions between the same individuals. But high levels of cooperation evolve only if the benefit-to-cost ratio exceeds a certain threshold that…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
Despite substantial research efforts evaluating how well large language models~(LLMs) handle global cultural diversity, the mechanisms behind their cultural knowledge acquisition, particularly in multilingual settings, remain unclear. We…
The distribution of cultural variants in a population is shaped by both neutral evolutionary dynamics and by selection pressures, which include several individual cognitive biases, demographic factors and social network structures. The…
In an increasingly interconnected world, a key scientific challenge is to examine mechanisms that lead to the widespread propagation of contagions, such as misinformation and pathogens, and identify risk factors that can trigger large-scale…
Deceptive game designs that manipulate players are increasingly common in the gaming industry, but the impact on players is not well studied. While studies have revealed player frustration, there is a gap in understanding how cultural…
Evolutionary games are a developing sub-field of game theory. This branch of game theory is used in the study of the adaptation of large, but finite, populations of agents to changes in the environment. It assumes that each agent has no…
Migration is a key mechanism for expansion of communities. In spatially heterogeneous environments, rapidly gaining knowledge about the local environment is key to the evolutionary success of a migrating population. For historical human…
We conducted an investigation of the effect that extreme variability of the individual's environment has in the individual's adaptability and, in general, in the co-evolution of a population. First we assume that the individuals are a kind…