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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…
Translation has played an important role in trade, law, commerce, politics, and literature for thousands of years. Translators have always tried to be invisible; ideal translations should look as if they were written originally in the…
In recent years, with the advent of highly scalable artificial-neural-network-based text representation methods the field of natural language processing has seen unprecedented growth and sophistication. It has become possible to distill…
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
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…
Gene gains and losses have shaped the gene repertoire of species since the universal last common ancestor to species today. Genes in extant species were gained at different historical times via de novo creation of new genes, duplication of…
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…
It is important to be clear as to whether a theory such as evolutionary archaeology pertains to biological evolution, in which acquired change is obliterated at the end of each generation, or cultural change, in which acquired change is…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
In the Middle Ages texts were learned by heart and spread using oral means of communication from generation to generation. Adaptation of the art of prose and poems allowed keeping particular descriptions and compositions characteristic for…
Computer simulations are an important tool for studying the mechanics of biological evolution. In particular, in silico work with agent-based models provides an opportunity to collect high-quality records of ancestry relationships among…
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…
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…
Since the advent of modern bioinformatics, the challenging, multifaceted problem of reconstructing phylogenetic history from biological sequences has hatched perennial statistical and algorithmic innovation. Studies of the phylogenetic…
Stochastic modeling of phylogenies raises five questions that have received varying levels of attention from quantitatively inclined biologists. 1) How large do we expect (from the model) the ration of maximum historical diversity to…
The time process of transport on randomly evolving trees is investigated. By introducing the notions of living and dead nodes a model of random tree evolution is constructed which describes the spreading in time of objects corresponding to…
(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…
In the theoretical study of distributed communication networks, "history trees" are a discrete structure that naturally models the concept that anonymous agents become distinguishable upon receiving different sets of messages from…
We present ReTracing, a multi-agent embodied performance art that adopts an archaeological approach to examine how artificial intelligence shapes, constrains, and produces bodily movement. Drawing from science-fiction novels, the project…