Modeling the Evolution of Gene-Culture Divergence
This addresses the challenge of simulating gene-culture divergence for researchers in evolutionary biology and cultural studies, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing models.
The authors tackled the problem of modeling genetic and cultural inheritance by proposing a model with distinct genome and memome stores, showing it improves on previous attempts and can achieve divergent gene-culture co-evolution.
We present a model for evolving agents using both genetic and cultural inheritance mechanisms. Within each agent our model maintains two distinct information stores we call the genome and the memome. Processes of adaptation are modeled as evolutionary processes at each level of adaptation (phylogenetic, ontogenetic, sociogenetic). We review relevant competing models and we show how our model improves on previous attempts to model genetic and cultural evolutionary processes. In particular we argue our model can achieve divergent gene-culture co-evolution.