相关论文: Natural selection. VII. History and interpretation…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
Three steps aid in the analysis of selection. First, describe phenotypes by their component causes. Components include genes, maternal effects, symbionts, and any other predictors of phenotype that are of interest. Second, describe fitness…
On one hand, kinship is a universal human phenomenon that tends to align with biological relatedness, which might suggest evolutionary foundations. On the other hand, kinship has exceptional variation across the human populations, which…
Kin selection theory has proven to be a popular and widely accepted account of how altruistic behaviour can evolve under natural selection. Hamilton's rule, first published in 1964, has since been experimentally validated across a range of…
How does social complexity depend on population size and cultural transmission? Kinship structures in traditional societies provide a fundamental illustration, where cultural rules between clans determine people's marriage possibilities.…
Individual success in group-structured populations has two components. First, an individual gains by outcompeting its neighbors for local resources. Second, an individual's share of group success must be weighted by the total productivity…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…
In many indigenous societies, people are categorised into several cultural groups, or clans, within which they believe to share ancestors. Clan attributions provide certain rules for marriage and descent. Such rules between clans constitute…
Extensive cooperation among biologically unrelated individuals is uniquely human and much current research attempts to explain this fact. We draw upon social, cultural, and psychological aspects of human uniqueness to present an integrated…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
The Price equation partitions total evolutionary change into two components. The first component provides an abstract expression of natural selection. The second component subsumes all other evolutionary processes, including changes during…
This article explains how natural selection works and how it has been inappropriately applied to the description of cultural change. It proposes an alternative evolutionary explanation for cultural evolution that describes it in terms of…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
Causality is a subject of philosophical debate and a central scientific issue with a long history. In the statistical domain, the study of cause and effect based on the notion of `fairness' in comparisons dates back several hundred years,…
Feature selection is a crucial preprocessing step in data analytics and machine learning. Classical feature selection algorithms select features based on the correlations between predictive features and the class variable and do not attempt…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Analysis often splits change into components. For example, how much of the observed variance is caused by genes or environment? In many cases, the split is ultimately made by the logic of the chain rule, which divides the difference of a…
The discovery of discriminatory bias in human or automated decision making is a task of increasing importance and difficulty, exacerbated by the pervasive use of machine learning and data mining. Currently, discrimination discovery largely…
We live in a world brimming with uncertainty, where we constantly have to make a lot of decisions under incomplete information. We are firm believers that our subjective belief cannot be computed by rigorous mathematical formula; instead…