Call for papers: «The Role of Information in Cultural Evolution»
A special issue of Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300). This special issue belongs to the section «Information Theory, Probability and Statistics». Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 February 2022.
Cultural evolution is an information processing system at two levels. At the micro level, culture is sustained by the information-processing capabilities of cognitive agents who are able to perceive, process, and reproduce the information found in cultural artifacts and behaviors, such as technology, language, music, and art. At the macro level, culture is an evolutionary process that discovers and stores information about good solutions to hard problems that humans and animals face as they struggle to survive in the world.
We welcome original research articles and reviews that focus on the role of information in culturally evolving systems and populations. We will consider all examples in humans, animals, and artificial information processing systems that transmit observable behaviors or artifacts that change over time, simulations or mathematical models of cultural evolution, and any reviews or philosophy of biology treatments of the following topics:
- The information content of cultural artifacts and its transmissibility;
- The role of cognitive biases and cognitive information processing in cultural evolution;
- The emergence of replicators or high-fidelity cultural transmission;
- Demonstrations of optimal compression in cultural artifacts, such as semantic systems;
- Information-theoretic approaches to language evolution;
- Social learning processes and the emergence or retention of cultural information;
- Information flow or diffusion in real-world networks of evolving cultural artifacts;
- Collective information processing in groups, institutions, or networks of agents;
- Information-theoretic approaches to creativity, novel variation, or design space exploration;
- Any treatment of cultural evolution as an information processing system.
Dr. Sarah Marzen
Dr. Vanessa Ferdinand
Dr. Helena Miton
Dr. Noga Zaslavsky
Prof. Dr. Martin Hilbert
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI’s English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- cultural evolution
- computational social science
- information flow
- replicators
- optimal compression
- cultural information
Published Papers
This special issue is now open for submission.