Related papers: How Does Culture Evolve?
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…
The commentators have brought a wealth of new perspectives to the question of how culture evolves. Each of their diverse disciplines--ranging from psychology to biology to anthropology to economics to engineering--has a valuable…
We understand the dynamics of the world around us as by associating pairs of events, where one event has some influence on the other. These pairs of events can be aggregated into a web of memories representing our understanding of an…
Discursive knowledge emerges as codification in flows of communication. The flows of communication are constrained and enabled by networks of communications as their historical manifestations at each moment of time. New publications modify…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
Autocatalytic sets are sets of entities that mutually catalyse each other's production through chemical reactions from a basic food source. Recently, the reflexively autocatalytic and food generated theory has introduced a formal definition…
We consider the population dynamics of a set of species whose network of catalytic interactions is described by a directed graph. The relationship between the attractors of this dynamics and the underlying graph theoretic structures like…
Categorization is a fundamental function of minds, with wide ranging implications for the rest of the cognitive system. In humans, categories are shared and communicated between minds, thus requiring explanations at the population level. In…
There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a…
We present a new model of the evolutionary dynamics and the growth of on-line social networks. The model emulates people's strategies for acquiring information in social networks, emphasising the local subjective view of an individual and…
Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of creativity is…
Knowledge built culturally across generations allows humans to learn far more than an individual could glean from their own experience in a lifetime. Cultural knowledge in turn rests on language: language is the richest record of what…
Generative AI is shaping an increasingly hybrid society, where ideas and cultural artefacs are created both by humans and intelligent machines. Human creativity is influenced in complex, nonlinear ways by the actions of AI-driven agents…
Determining how scientific achievements influence the subsequent process of knowledge creation is a fundamental step in order to build a unified ecosystem for studying the dynamics of innovation and competitiveness. Relying separately on…
Human history has been marked by social instability and conflict, often driven by the irreconcilability of opposing sets of beliefs, ideologies, and religious dogmas. The dynamics of belief systems has been studied mainly from two distinct…
We introduce a model for the emergence of innovations, in which cognitive processes are described as random walks on the network of links among ideas or concepts, and an innovation corresponds to the first visit of a node. The transition…
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…
To unveil the logic of cell from a level of chemical reaction dynamics, we need to clarify how ensemble of chemicals can autonomously produce the set of chemical, without assuming a specific external control echanism. A cell consists of a…
We consider a model of cultural evolution for a strategy selection in a population of individuals who interact in a game theoretic framework. The evolution combines individual learning of the environment (population strategy profile),…
This paper describes a tentative model for how discrete memories transform into an interconnected conceptual network, or worldview, wherein relationships between memories are forged by way of abstractions. The model draws on Kauffman's…