Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin discrimination. We argue that an interesting research direction would be to develop computational and experimental systems for studying evolutionary processes that involve multiple layers of inheritance (such as genes, epigenetic inheritance, language, and culture) and feedbacks (such as gene-culture coevolution and mate choice) as well as open-ended niche construction---all of which are important in human history and evolution. Such systems would also be a clear way to motivate evolution and computation to scholars and students across diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as to scholars and students in the social sciences and humanities. In principle, computational models of cultural evolution could be compared to data, given that large-scale datasets already exist for tracking cultural change in real-time. Thus, experimental evolution, as a laboratory and computational science, is poised to grow as an educational tool for people to question and study where we come from, why we believe what we believe, and where we as a species may be headed.
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 plasticity in the absence of cultural transmission, in phenotypes beyond behavior? We investigate a model in which imitation is unbundled from cultural transmission: an organism's adult phenotype is plastically altered by its experiences as a juvenile of other juveniles' genetically determined traits. The only information transmitted between generations is genetic…
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 generations. We propose here a population dynamics model devised to analyse paradigm shifts. In this model individuals are defined by a vector of cultural traits that can change mainly through imitation of other individuals' traits. The novelty of the model is that cultural traits may interact reinforcing or hindering each other. Imitation is then biased by the 'cultu…
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 are regularly discarded at the end of the lifetime of the individuals that acquired them. While the rationale for framing culture as an evolutionary process is correct, it does not follow that culture is a Darwinian or selectionist process, or that population genetics provides viable starting points for modeling cultural change. This paper lays out step-by-s…
Evolving genealogies in cultural evolution, the descendant process, and the number of cultural traits
School of Interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences（交叉数理科学学院）；Research Center for Integrative Evolutionary Science, SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies)（前沿科学研究中心，SOKENDAI（advanced studies大学））；Kochi University of Technology（高知工科大学）；Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学技术学院）
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are very Antropocentric and in many ways deleterious to the other life forms. Here we try to identify future scenarios, where the less deleterious is the Natural-Technological Model that points the urgent need to change the evolutionary direction of the human niche seeking the resumption of original ecological relations. New cultural habits and novel technologi…
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 scope of possibilities). By culture we mean extrasomatic adaptations--including behavior and technology--that are socially rather than sexually transmitted. This chapter synthesizes research from anthropology, psychology, archaeology, and agent-based modeling into a speculative yet coherent account of two fundamental cognitive transitions underlying human cult…
Anthropogenic changes of the biota and human hyper-dominance are modulating the evolution of life on our planet. Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, and has already modified uncountable biological interactions. While numerous species have been extinguished by human actions, others are directly favored, such as alien species, hybrids, and genetically modified organisms. These biodiversity shifts have generated new interactions among all living organisms in anthropized or anthropogenic ecosystems, with the consequent establishment of novel evolutiona…
Biological and cultural inspired optimization algorithms are nowadays part of the basic toolkit of a great many research domains. By mimicking processes in nature and animal societies, these general-purpose search algorithms promise to deliver optimal or near-optimal solutions using hardly any information on the optimization problems they are set to tackle. Here we study the performances of a cultural-inspired algorithm -- the imitative learning search -- as well as of asexual and sexual variants of evolutionary algorithms in finding the global maxima of NK-fitness landscapes. The main perform…
