Related papers: On Selfish Memes
The advent of social media has provided data and insights about how people relate to information and culture. While information is composed by bits and its fundamental building bricks are relatively well understood, the same cannot be said…
Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes that spread across human culture by means of imitation. What makes a meme and what distinguishes it from other forms of information, however, is still poorly understood. Our analysis of memes in…
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…
Warning: This paper contains memes that may be offensive to some readers. Multimodal Internet Memes are now a ubiquitous fixture in online discourse. One strand of meme-based research is the classification of memes according to various…
This paper presents a new type of evolutionary algorithm (EA) based on the concept of "meme", where the individuals forming the population are represented by semantic networks and the fitness measure is defined as a function of the…
Holland's (1975) genetic algorithm is a minimal computer model of natural selection that made it possible to investigate the effect of manipulating specific parameters on the evolutionary process. If culture is, like biology, a form of…
Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary…
Memes are a popular form of communicating trends and ideas in social media and on the internet in general, combining the modalities of images and text. They can express humor and sarcasm but can also have offensive content. Analyzing and…
Formal modelling provides a toolkit for understanding cultural dynamics, from individual decisions to recurring patterns of change. This chapter explains what models are and why they matter. Using a precise, shared language, they aid…
A significantly under-explored area of evolutionary optimization in the literature is the study of optimization methodologies that can evolve along with the problems solved. Particularly, present evolutionary optimization approaches…
We create an artificial system of agents (attention-based neural networks) which selectively exchange messages with each-other in order to study the emergence of memetic evolution and how memetic evolutionary pressures interact with genetic…
Meme is an interesting word. Internet memes offer unique insights into the changes in our perception of the world, the media and our own lives. If you surf the Internet for long enough, you will see it somewhere on the Internet. With the…
The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between different…
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…
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…
Social networks readily transmit information, albeit with less than perfect fidelity. We present a large-scale measurement of this imperfect information copying mechanism by examining the dissemination and evolution of thousands of memes,…
On the Internet, information circulates fast and widely, and the form of content adapts to comply with users' cognitive abilities. Memes are an emerging aspect of the internet system of signification, and their visual schemes evolve by…
Memes are a powerful tool for communication over social media. Their affinity for evolving across politics, history, and sociocultural phenomena makes them an ideal communication vehicle. To comprehend the subtle message conveyed within a…
The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of machine culture, culture mediated or generated by…
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…