Related papers: Conjugate Distribution Laws in Cultural Evolution …
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…
We present a stylized model with feedback loops for the evolution of a population's wealth over generations. Individuals have both talent and wealth: talent is a random variable distributed identically for everyone, but wealth is a random…
The remarkable ecological success of humans is often attributed to our ability to develop complex cultural artefacts that enable us to cope with environmental challenges. The evolution of complex culture (cumulative cultural evolution) is…
Understanding the mechanisms underlying the formation of cultural traits, such as preferences, opinions and beliefs is an open challenge. Trait formation is intimately connected to cultural dynamics, which has been the focus of a variety of…
We study a model describing the spread of a globalized culture in a population of individuals localized at the nodes of a social network. The influence of this globalized culture, assumed to be foreign to the local culture, is measured by a…
Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…
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…
Although a number of models have been developed to investigate the emergence of culture and evolutionary phases in social systems, one important aspect has not yet been sufficiently emphasized. This is the structure of the underlaying…
Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that graphs that exhibit heterogeneity in the number of connections…
We introduce a mathematical model that combines the concepts of complex contagion with payoff-biased imitation, to describe how social behaviors spread through a population. Traditional models of social learning by imitation are based on…
Music sampling is a common practice among hip-hop and electronic producers that has played a critical role in the development of particular subgenres. Artists preferentially sample drum breaks, and previous studies have suggested that these…
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…
Horizontal gene transfer consists in exchanging genetic materials between microorganisms during their lives. This is a major mechanism of bacterial evolution and is believed to be of main importance in antibiotics resistance. We consider a…
Intraspecific trait variation has been increasingly recognized as an important factor in determining species interaction and diversity. Eco-evolutionary models have studied the distribution of trait values within a population that changes…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
In an increasingly interconnected world, a key scientific challenge is to examine mechanisms that lead to the widespread propagation of contagions, such as misinformation and pathogens, and identify risk factors that can trigger large-scale…
We consider the problem of determining the time evolution of a trait distribution in a mathematical model of non-uniform populations with parametric heterogeneity. This means that we consider only heterogeneous populations in which…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
Inequality in human success may emerge through endogenous success-breeds-success dynamics but may also originate in pre-existing differences in talent. It is widely recognized that the skew in static frequency distributions of success…
Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we…