Related papers: A renormalization group theory of cultural evoluti…
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…
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…
We present a model for evolving agents using both genetic and cultural inheritance mechanisms. Within each agent our model maintains two distinct information stores we call the genome and the memome. Processes of adaptation are modeled as…
Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective…
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…
We consider the problem of the evolution of a code within a structured population of agents. The agents try to maximise their information about their environment by acquiring information from the outputs of other agents in the population. A…
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…
Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…
Empirical evidence suggests that social structure may have changed from hierarchical to egalitarian and back along the evolutionary line of humans. We model a society subject to competing cognitive and social navigation constraints. The…
In lieu of an abstract here is the first paragraph: No other species remotely approaches the human capacity for the cultural evolution of novelty that is accumulative, adaptive, and open-ended (i.e., with no a priori limit on the size or…
This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
Cultural transmission is the domain-general social skill that allows agents to acquire and use information from each other in real-time with high fidelity and recall. In humans, it is the inheritance process that powers cumulative cultural…
This chapter begins by outlining a promising, new theoretical framework for the process by which human culture evolves inspired by the views of complexity theorists on the problem of how life began. Elements of culture, like species, evolve…
It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic…
Understanding how cognitive and social mechanisms shape the evolution of complex artifacts such as songs is central to cultural evolution research. Social network topology (what artifacts are available?), selection (which are chosen?), and…
EVOC (for EVOlution of Culture) is a computer model of culture that enables us to investigate how various factors such as barriers to cultural diffusion, the presence and choice of leaders, or changes in the ratio of innovation to imitation…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
Evolutionary game theory is an abstract and simple, but very powerful way to model evolutionary dynamics. Even complex biological phenomena can sometimes be abstracted to simple two-player games. But often, the interaction between several…
The profound impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on biology has led to the acceptance of the theory in many complex systems that lie well beyond its original domain. Culture is one example that also exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary…