CSS Seminar
On Friday, October 20, Peter Revay, CSS PhD Candidate, will present Modeling the Co-Evolution of Culture, Signs and Network Structure: Theory and Applications. In Peter’s words: “I focus on the drivers of diffusion and adoption of cultural traits, such as values, beliefs, and behaviors. I adopt an evolutionary view of cultural dynamics. I use concepts from dual-inheritance theories of cultural evolution to develop and test an agent-based model capable of simulating the changing distributions of cultural traits in a large population of actors over the course of prolonged periods of time. Particularly, I pay close attention to the mechanisms of indirectly biased transmission of traits and guided variation, which are both hypothesized to be significant aspects of cultural dynamics. Indirectly biased transmission consists of the adoption of specific trait variants on the basis of possession of initially unrelated external markers. Guided variation is then individual adaptation driven by self-exploration.
“Furthermore, I make use of large publicly available datasets to validate my models. The first one of these is the database of bill co-authorship in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1973 to 2008. The other is a comprehensive dataset of scientific co-authorship in various disciplines stretching back for over a century.
“The results show that cultural evolution models based on indirectly biased transmission and guided variation are suitable to explaining the dynamics of various complex social networks.”
The talk will begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall, and be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.
These sessions will be live-streamed on the newly created CSS program YouTube channel.
For announcements regarding these and future streams, please join the : CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group.
For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please click here.