Rob Boyd

These is the beginning of Robert Boyd’s thoughts on the workshop on cultural evolution convened by Dan Dennett in Santa Fe in May 2014. Boyd’s full text, because it contains mathematical symbols, is in PDF format and is accessible here.

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Some thoughts about things I learned at Dan Dennett’s excellent party

I have been thinking about the relationship between the kind of models that Pete, Joe and I have made and the ECM framework sketched by Dan and Nicolas in their paper. In particular, I have trying to understand how the mechanistic processes represented in our approach relate to homo-hetero distinction central to the ECM approach. In my remarks on Sue Blackmore’s papers I sketched a simple model in which there were two variants with a selection stage and a transformation stage. So, rst I’d like to convert this model to the ECM framework developed by Sperber and Cladiere.

More here

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