Related papers: Spatial evolution of human dialects
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…
We derive an expression for the variation between parallel trajectories in phenotypic evolution, extending the well known result that predicts the mean evolutionary path in adaptive dynamics or quantitative genetics. We show how this…
A statistical mechanics theory for a fluid stratified in density is presented. The predicted statistical equilibrium state is the most probable outcome of turbulent stirring. The slow temporal evolution of the vertical density profile is…
GPT-style language models are sensitive to single-token changes at generation points where the predicted probability distribution is spread across multiple tokens. Viewing this sensitivity as a geometric property, we derive an…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
Analyses of urban scaling laws assume that observations in different cities are independent of the existence of nearby cities. Here we introduce generative models and data-analysis methods that overcome this limitation by modelling…
Interpreting the effects of variants within the human genome and proteome is essential for analysing disease risk, predicting medication response, and developing personalised health interventions. Due to the intrinsic similarities between…
We investigate the nature of genetic drift acting at the leading edge of range expansions, building on recent results in [Hallatschek et al., Proc.\ Natl.\ Acad.\ Sci., \textbf{104}(50): 19926 - 19930 (2007)]. A well mixed population of two…
Migrations have played an important role in shaping the genetic diversity of human populations. Understanding genomic data thus requires careful modeling of historical gene flow. Here we consider the effect of relatively recent population…
Understanding the relationship between population and the built environment is essential for addresing socio-spatial inequalities. While researchers have long theorized these dynamics, empirical analyses remain limited. This study develops…
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…
We investigate a simple quantitative genetics model subjet to a gradual environmental change from the viewpoint of the phylogenies of the living individuals. We aim to understand better how the past traits of their ancestors are shaped by…
Human flourishing is often severely limited by persistent violence. Quantitative conflict research has found common temporal and other statistical patterns in warfare, but very little is understood about its general spatial patterns. While…
The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer…
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…
The goal of this paper is to provide mathematically rigorous tools for modelling the evolution of a community of interacting individuals. We model the population by a measure space where the measure determines the abundance of individual…
We propose a model of the evolution of a matrix along a phylogenetic tree, in which transformations affect either entire rows or columns of the matrix. This represents the change of both lexical and phonological aspects of linguistic data,…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…
Effects of externally imposed periodic changes in the environment on population dynamics are studied with the help of a simple model. The environmental changes are represented by the temporal and spatial dependence of the competition terms…