Meme and Variations: A Computer Model of Cultural Evolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces MAV, a computational model inspired by genetic algorithms, to simulate how ideas evolve in society through variation, imitation, and learning, shedding light on cultural evolution processes.

Contribution

It develops a minimal, biologically inspired model of cultural evolution that incorporates social and cognitive phenomena affecting idea transmission.

Findings

MAV demonstrates how variation and imitation influence cultural diversity.

The model shows the effects of biological and social factors on idea fitness.

Results suggest mechanisms for the evolution of complex cultural traits.

Abstract

Holland's (1975) genetic algorithm is a minimal computer model of natural selection that made it possible to investigate the effect of manipulating specific parameters on the evolutionary process. If culture is, like biology, a form of evolution, it should be possible to similarly abstract the underlying skeleton of the process and develop a minimal model of it. Meme and Variations, or MAV, is a computational model, inspired by the genetic algorithm, of how ideas evolve in a society of interacting individuals (Gabora 1995). The name is a pun on the classical music form 'theme and variations', because it is based on the premise that novel ideas are variations of old ones; they result from tweaking or combining existing ideas in new ways (Holland et al. 1981). MAV explores the impact of biological phenomena such as over-dominance and epistasis as well as cognitive and social phenomena such as the ability to learn generalizations or imitate others on the fitness and diversity of cultural transmissible actions.