The last two decades have seen an explosion in research analysing cultural change as a
Darwinian evolutionary process. Here I provide an overview of the theory of cultural …

It is often assumed in experiments and models that social learning abilities–how often
individuals copy others, plus who and how they copy–are species-typical. Yet there is …

Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items
of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes …

In the past few decades, scholars from several disciplines have pursued the curious parallel
noted by Darwin between the genetic evolution of species and the cultural evolution of …

Cultural evolutionary models have identified a range of conditions under which social
learning (copying others) is predicted to be adaptive relative to asocial learning (learning on …

We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional
content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that …

A widely accepted view in the cultural evolutionary literature is that culture forms a dynamic
system of elements (or 'traits') linked together by a variety of relationships. Despite this, large …

Digital media have today an enormous diffusion, and their influence on the behavior of a
vast part of the human population can hardly be underestimated. In this review I propose that …

Previous work on mathematical models of cultural evolution has mainly focused on the
diffusion of simple cultural elements. However, a characteristic feature of human cultural …

Many cultural traits exhibit volatile dynamics, commonly dubbed fashions or fads. Here we
show that realistic fashion-like dynamics emerge spontaneously if individuals can copy …