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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…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
The current theory of evolution is almost the one Darwin and Wallace proposed two centuries ago and the following discoveries e.g., Mendelian genetics and neutral mutation theory have not made significant modifications. The current…
We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…
A tendency in biological theorizing is to formulate principles above or equal to Evolution by Variation and Selection of Darwin and Wallace. In this letter I analyze one such recent proposal which did so for the developmental ascendency. I…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
Living things, computers, societies, and even books are part of a grand evolutionary struggle to survive. That struggle shapes nature, nations, religions, art, science, and you. What you think, feel, and do is determined by it. Darwinian…
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different…
The commentators have brought a wealth of new perspectives to the question of how culture evolves. Each of their diverse disciplines--ranging from psychology to biology to anthropology to economics to engineering--has a valuable…
Categorization is a fundamental function of minds, with wide ranging implications for the rest of the cognitive system. In humans, categories are shared and communicated between minds, thus requiring explanations at the population level. In…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Historical sciences like evolutionary biology reconstruct past events by using the traces that the past has bequeathed to the present. The Markov Chain Convergence Theorem and the Data Processing Inequality describe how the mutual…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…
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…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
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…
Natural selection successfully explains how organisms accumulate adaptive change despite that traits acquired over a lifetime are eliminated at the end of each generation. However, in some domains that exhibit cumulative, adaptive change --…