Scaling in Biological and Social Networks - Abstract - Chavalarias
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
| Workshop Navigation |
Modeling cultural dynamics with metamimetic games : a multi-scale approach
The study of human societies' self-organization calls for models that are fundamentally different from those used for modeling other animal societies : time scales for cultural evolution are much smaller than biological time scales. More over, each individual can consider different time scales relatively to her different goals.
We will give here an overview on the way metamimetic games can handles these different time scales that also correspond to different spatial scales at the population level in spatial games. We will show how this is related to the problem of endogenization of variables in social dynamics modeling and how we can interpret the fact that cultural evolution is in fact driving and biological evolution.
Transversal question for this approach
Most models of cultural evolution are formally equivalent to a hierarchy of rules, where rules at each level evolve under the dynamics defined by their meta-rules. Depending on the level, these rules can be interpreted as behavioural rules, decision rules, rules for cultural or genetic transmission.
The emergence of patterns at the collective level can, thus, be understood as the selection of a particular distribution on the set of possible rules and meta-rules. In this framework, the question of modeling self-organization within socio-economic systems can be expressed in the following way : “Is it possible to endogenise the distribution of meta-rules of behavior such that this distribution becomes the outcome of the dynamics it defines?”