Development of a Cultural Algorithm and a Trans-disciplinary Framework for Evolutionary Processes

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Elements of culture adaptively build on one another, diversify, and become more complex over time. It has been proposed that culture, like early and microbial life, evolves through, not survival of the fittest, but transformation by way of communal exchange. This research program aims to develop a general understanding of evolution that incorporates these processes. The research will in part build on EVOC, a communal exchange based computational model of cultural evolution consisting of neural network based agents that invent and imitate ideas and thereby evolve fitter and more diverse actions. The new agents will restructure information using an existing mathematical model of concept interactions that accounts for (1) how concepts change in different contexts, and (2) how humans shift between different modes of thought depending on the situation. EVOC2 will generate economic networks involving both invention of goods and recycling of wastes. Waste recycling is an ideal application for EVOC2 because it entails restructuring of information from one domain to another. EVOC2 is expected to evolve novelty that is not just cumulative, adaptive, and open-ended, but transformative. The skeleton of EVOC2 will be abstracted to develop a general-purpose cultural algorithm (CA) analogous to the genetic algorithm (GA), an optimization tool with diverse applications. The CA is expected to outperform the GA on tasks that require that information be considered from a different perspective, and thereby restructured. The research will build on previous efforts toward the development of an integrated framework for evolutionary processes that encompasses cultural evolution and natural selection, as well as early and microbial life. The proposed research is necessary to achieve a unification of the social and behavioral sciences comparable with Darwin's unification of the life sciences. It is expected to promote a scientific understanding of the current accelerated pace of cultural change and its transformative effects on humans and our planet, and to aid us in finding solutions to complex crises we now face.