Related papers: On Selfish Memes
As we navigate our cultural environment, we learn cultural biases, like those around gender, social class, health, and body weight. It is unclear, however, exactly how public culture becomes private culture. In this paper, we provide a…
The propagation of online memes is initially influenced by meme creators and secondarily by meme consumers, whose individual sharing decisions accumulate to determine total meme propagation. We characterize this as a sender/receiver…
We address the problem of diversification in religions by studying selection on cultural memes that colonize humans hosts. In analogy to studying the evolution of pathogens or symbionts colonizing animal hosts, we use models for…
Humans have been using symbolic representation (i.e. art) as a creative cultural form indisputably for at least 80,000 years. A description of the processes central to the evolution of art from sculpted earthen forms early in human…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…
Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this paper I theorize the ways in which word…
The study of meme propagation and the prediction of meme trajectory are emerging areas of interest in the field of complex networks research. In addition to the properties of the meme itself, the structural properties of the underlying…
Memes are graphics and text overlapped so that together they present concepts that become dubious if one of them is absent. It is spread mostly on social media platforms, in the form of jokes, sarcasm, motivating, etc. After the success of…
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…
The evolution and function of imitation have always been placed within the confines of animal learning and associated with its crucial role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Can imitation evolve as a form of phenotypic…
Visual culture has long been deployed by actors across the political spectrum as tools of political mobilization, and have recently incorporated new communication tools, such as memes, GIFs, and emojis. In this study, we analyze the…
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…
A model for the spreading of online information or "memes" on multiplex networks is introduced and analyzed using branching-process methods. The model generalizes that of [Gleeson et al., Phys.Rev. X., 2016] in two ways. First, even for a…
This paper seeks to build upon the previous literature on gender aspects in research collaboration and knowledge diffusion. Our approach adds the meme inheritance notion to traditional citation analysis, as we investigate if scientific…
The Semantic Theory of Evolution (STE) takes the existence of a number of arbitrary communication codes as a fundamental feature of life, from the genetic code to human cultural communication codes. Their arbitrariness enables, at each…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
In this paper, we will expound upon the concepts proffered in [1], where we proposed an information theoretic approach to intelligence in the computational sense. We will examine data and meme aggregation, and study the effect of limited…
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
Large language models (LLMs) are often described as multilingual because they can understand and respond in many languages. However, speaking a language is not the same as reasoning within a culture. This distinction motivates a critical…