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In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
We consider a Moran-type model of cultural evolution, which describes how traits emerge, are transmitted, and get lost in populations. Our analysis focuses on the underlying cultural genealogies; they were first described by Aguilar and…
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
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…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
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…
Evolution is the principal theoretical framework in Pacific Island archaeology. Progressive cultural evolutionary stages, particularly the chiefdom, provided the earliest framework. These ideas were increasingly linked to islands as…
The theory of natural selection cannot describe how early life evolved, in part because acquired characteristics are passed on through horizontal exchange. It has been proposed that culture, like life, began with the emergence of…
Human societies around the world interact with each other by developing and maintaining social norms, and it is critically important to understand how such norms emerge and change. In this work, we define an evolutionary game-theoretic…
The Darwinian paradigm of biological evolution is based on the separability of the variation and selection processes. As a result, the population thinking had always been an integral part of the Darwinian approach. I propose an alternative…
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
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…
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…