Meme and Variations: A Computer Model of Cultural Evolution

Holland's (1975) genetic algorithm is a minimal computer model of natural selection that made it possible to investigate the effect of manipulating specific parameters on the evolutionary process. If culture is, like biology, a form of evolution, it should be possible to similarly abstract the underlying skeleton of the process and develop a minimal model of it. Meme and Variations, or MAV, is a computational model, inspired by the genetic algorithm, of how ideas evolve in a society of interacting individuals (Gabora 1995). The name is a pun on the classical music form 'theme and variations', because it is based on the premise that novel ideas are variations of old ones; they result from tweaking or combining existing ideas in new ways (Holland et al. 1981). MAV explores the impact of several phenomena that are unique to culture. These are introduced briefly here, and the technical details of how they are implemented will be presented shortly.