Social Learning and Cultural Evolution in Artificial Life

Abstract

We describe the questions and discussions raised at the First Workshop on Social Learning and Cultural Evolution held at theArtificial Life Conference 2016 in Cancún, Mexico in July 2016. The purpose of the workshop was to assemble artificial life researchers interested in social learning and cultural evolution into one group so that we could focus on recent work and interesting open questions. Our discussion related to both the mechanisms of social learning and cultural evolution and the consequences and influence of social learning and cultural evolution on living systems. We present the contributions of our workshop presenters and conclude with a discussion of the more important open questions in this area.

Mechanisms of Social Learning in Evolved Artificial Life

“…Intuitively, the The foremost finding, although not a straightforward answer to the research questions of this study, that arises from the figures in Table 1 is that SL leads to a more efficient and more effective adaptation than both IL and no learning. This result is substantially in agreement with previous experimental studies on social learning in similar settings, as, e.g., Marriott et al (2018), where, as here, SL outperforms IL and IL outperforms no learning.…”

“…Jolley et al (2016) propose different criteria for choosing the agent to teach the other agents in social learning, being either a parent, the fittest individual, the oldest individual, a random individual or another young agent, however they do not consider learning from multiple teachers, which is a research question that we address in this work. Relevant social learning aspects, such as the choice of whom to learn from in a population, and what aspects of culture are transmitted, have not been completely understood yet, and are open to future research (Marriott et al, 2018). In the present study, we attempt to answer a few of these questions in the context of artificial life.…”

Evolved Open-Endedness in Cultural Evolution: A New Dimension in Open-Ended Evolution Research

“…Despite this, complexity researchers in archaeology, comparative psychology, paleoanthropology, psychology, philosophers, and many others have been able to make progress on disentangling distinct causal pathways, and to show how these can be put together again to explain the evolution of a distinct system of open-ended evolution: human cultural evolution (Boyd & Richerson, 1985;Tomasello, 1999). problems (Bedau et al, 2000) of the field, and spawning a regular workshop series at the Artificial Life conference (Marriott et al, 2018). It is therefore curious that open-ended cultural evolution has received relatively little attention as a possible avenue for fruitful research until recently (see Bedau et al (2019)).…”

“…Having only one solid example of a real open-ended system is a problem: it limits one's ability to consider other possibilities and explore more widely in efforts to understand, develop and analyse open-ended evolution. However, it is increasingly being recognised that there is another evolutionary system from which one can find inspiration: cultural evolution (Borg & Powers, 2021;Marriott et al, 2018).…”

ALife and Society: Editorial Introduction to the Artificial Life Conference 2016 Special Issue

“…Chris Marriott et al present the different topics that revolve around the mechanisms of social learning and of those that may be responsible for cultural change. Moreover, a set of core questions and problems are identified [10]. Finally, concerning social themes, Simon T. Powersʼs article "The Institutional Approach for Modeling the Evolution of Human Societies" introduces a model on how rules can emerge as institutions among societies in a similar vein to that of Elinor Ostromʼs thinking.…”