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Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
In this paper we delve into the historical evolution of data as a fundamental element in communication and knowledge transmission. The paper traces the stages of knowledge dissemination from oral traditions to the digital era, highlighting…
Our knowledge of past cultures relies considerably on written material. For centuries, texts have been copied, altered, then transmitted or lost - eventually, from surviving documents, philologists attempt to reconstruct text phylogenies…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
Simonton is attempting to salvage the Blind Variation Selective Retention theory of creativity (often referred to as the Darwinian theory of creativity) by dissociating it from Darwinism. This is a necessary move for complex reasons…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…
Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
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…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
Scientific literature has been growing exponentially for decades, with publications from the last twenty years now comprising 60% of all academic output. While the impact of information overload on news and social-media consumption is…
Evolution by Natural Selection is a process by which progeny inherit some properties from their progenitors with small variation. These properties are subject to Natural Selection and are called adaptive traits and carriers of the latter…
The ongoing explosion of genome sequence data is transforming how we reconstruct and understand the histories of biological systems. Across biological scales, from individual cells to populations and species, trees-based models provide a…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…
Biologists rely heavily on the language of information, coding, and transmission that is commonplace in the field of information theory as developed by Claude Shannon, but there is open debate about whether such language is anything more…
Current-day genomes bear the mark of the evolutionary processes. One of the strongest indications is the sequence homology among families of proteins that perform similar biological functions in different species. The number of proteins in…