Related papers: Cultural Evolution as a Non-Stationary Stochastic …

It has been argued that semantic systems reflect pressure for efficiency, and a current debate concerns the cultural evolutionary process that produces this pattern. We consider efficiency as instantiated in the Information Bottleneck (IB)…

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…

Dawkins' replicator-based conception of evolution has led to widespread mis-application selectionism across the social sciences because it does not address the paradox that inspired the theory of natural selection in the first place: how do…

We discuss a model of an economic community consisting of $N$ interacting agents. The state of each agent at any time is characterized, in general, by a mixed strategy profile drawn from a space of $s$ pure strategies. The community evolves…

Axelrod's model for the dissemination of culture contains two key factors required to model the process of diffusion of innovations, namely, social influence (i.e., individuals become more similar when they interact) and homophily (i.e.,…

The complex interplay between human societies and their environments has long been a subject of fascination for social scientists. Utilizing agent-based modeling, this study delves into the profound implications of seemingly inconsequential…

Axelrod's model describes the dissemination of a set of cultural traits in a society constituted by individual agents. In a social context, nevertheless, individual choices toward a specific attitude are also at the basis of the formation…

We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…

In the natural world, life has found innumerable ways to survive and often thrive. Between and even within species, each individual is in some manner unique, and this diversity lends adaptability and robustness to life. In this work, we aim…

Evolutionary game dynamics describes not only frequency dependent genetical evolution, but also cultural evolution in humans. In this context, successful strategies spread by imitation. It has been shown that the details of strategy update…

In this paper three computational models for the study of the evolution of cooperation under cultural propagation are studied: Kin Selection, Direct Reciprocity and Indirect Reciprocity. Two analyzes are reported, one comparing their…

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…

This article is a presentation of specific recent results describing scaling limits of individual-based models. Thanks to them, we wish to relate the time-scales typical of demographic dynamics and natural selection to the parameters of the…

Evolutionary game theory is a successful mathematical framework geared towards understanding the selective pressures that affect the evolution of the strategies of agents engaged in interactions with potential conflicts. While a…

We present a model for evolving agents using both genetic and cultural inheritance mechanisms. Within each agent our model maintains two distinct information stores we call the genome and the memome. Processes of adaptation are modeled as…

In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…

We investigate the collective behavior of a globalized society under the influence of endogenous mass media trends. The mass media trend is a global field corresponding to the statistical mode of the states of the agents in the system. The…

Social trends or fashions are spontaneous collective decisions made by large portions of a community, often without an apparent good reason. The spontaneous formation of trends provides a well documented mechanism for the spread of…

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…

Model collapse, the progressive degradation of LLMs trained on their own outputs, has been characterized statistically but lacks a linguistic explanation for which structures degrade, in what order, and why. We show that iterated learning…