[FRIAM] gene-culture coevolution

[Marcus Daniels]

It’s not clear to me a mechanism that facilitates more and more greenhouse gas producing agents is necessarily a good thing.   Anyway, it defines how fitness is defined.
Culture is a sort of field that makes people think the same way.   Why have billions of agents if there are effectively a small number of forms or prototypes for them?   When Europeans sneer at the U.S. for having little culture, I take that as a compliment!

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Tuesday, June 8, 2021 12:01 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] gene-culture coevolution

Interesting topic but the paper contains no model: no mathematical theory, no experimental data, no agent-based model, nothing. I think it would help a lot to understand gene-culture coevolution if people would start to notice there are indeed hidden genes in cultural evolution, but that's just my point of view.

Cultural evolution is notoriously difficult to model because it is based on language and computers can not understand language (yet). Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd have written a number of books about it and tried to model it mathematically, but it unclear to me how far their complex models match reality.

Even religion is extremely difficult to model, although it is the most basic form of a collective organism in cultural evolution. It is difficult to model because it is based on abstract beliefs and the understanding of language. The best model I can think of is a swarm, because the rules of swarm intelligence are isomorphic to the basic religious rules in "abstract behavior phase space" (as I try to explain in the book).

It is possible to use abstract models though which simulate strategies like cooperation and defection, collective processes like wars, tributes and taxes, etc. Robert Axelrod's tribute model for example is a classic agent-based model which is useful to study the emergence of states and empires. I have tried to implement the model in 2 dimensions at the weekend:
https://github.com/JochenFromm/SwarmIntelligence/blob/master/notebooks/Emergence%20of%20Political%20Actors.ipynb

-J.

-------- Original message --------
From: "uǝlƃ ☤>$" <gepropella at gmail.com<mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>>
Date: 6/7/21 22:17 (GMT+01:00)
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: [FRIAM] gene-culture coevolution

Researchers: Culture drives human evolution more than genetics
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-culture-human-evolution-genetics.html

Paywalled Paper:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0538

Accessible version:
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=eco_facpub

--
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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