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Cultural evolution allows ideas and technologies to accumulate across generations, reaching their most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that…
A remarkable feature of human beings is their capacity for creative behaviour, referring to their ability to react to problems in ways that are novel, surprising, and useful. Transformational creativity is a form of creativity where the…
Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…
This paper proposes a theory of creativity, referred to as honing theory, which posits that creativity fuels the process by which culture evolves through communal exchange amongst minds that are self-organizing, self-maintaining, and…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
This chapter synthesizes evidence from cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychological studies, and computational models for a complex systems inspired theory of creativity, and its role in cultural evolution. Creativity…
The speed and transformative power of human cultural evolution is evident from the change it has wrought on our planet. This chapter proposes a human computation program aimed at (1) distinguishing algorithmic from non-algorithmic…
Many elements of culture made their first appearance in the Upper Paleolithic. Previous hypotheses put forth to explain this unprecedented burst of creativity are found wanting. Examination of the psychological basis of creativity leads to…
We assume that the natural intelligence (human, particularly) is equivalent to a large inferring structure, which took shape in the last 400/500 million years. Then two hypotheses, about this structure and its development, are put forward…
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…
The central nervous system and particularly the brain was designed to control the life cycle of a living being. With increasing size and sophistication, in mammals, the brain became capable of exercising significant control over life. In…
Autocatalytic networks have been used to model the emergence of self-organizing structure capable of sustaining life and undergoing biological evolution. Here, we model the emergence of cognitive structure capable of undergoing cultural…
Research in cultural evolution aims at providing causal explanations for the change of culture over time. Over the past decades, this field has generated an important body of knowledge, using experimental, historical, and computational…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
The human cognitive system is a remarkable exemplar of a general intelligent system whose competence is not confined to a specific problem domain. Evidently, general cognitive competences are a product of a prolonged and complex process of…
We argue that traditional Western science cannot adequately describe sports and other types of human behavior. Then we make an argument why a complex adaptive systems approach has the potential to provide the foundation for such a theory.…
As artificial intelligence (AI) models become routinely integrated into knowledge work, cognitive acts increasingly occur in two distinct modes: individually, using biological resources alone, or distributed across a human-AI system.…
Low-level "adaptive" and higher-level "sophisticated" human reasoning processes have been proposed to play opposing roles in the emergence of unpredictable collective behaviors like crowd panics, traffic jams, and market bubbles. While…
Cultural awareness in language models is the capacity to understand and adapt to diverse cultural contexts. However, most existing approaches treat culture as static background knowledge, overlooking its dynamic and evolving nature. This…