ABSTRACT
Recent agent-based computational simulation models have demonstrated how cooperative interactions can be sustained by simple cultural learning rules that dynamically create simple social structures (Riolo 1997, Riolo et al. 2001; Hales 2000, 2006; Hales and Areteconi 2006; Marcozzi and Hales 2008; Traulsen and Nowak 2006). These classes of models implement agents as adaptive imitators that copy the traits of others and, occasionally, adapt (or mutate) them. Although these models bear close comparison with biologically inspired models-they implement simple forms of evolutionthe interpretation can be of a minimal cultural, or social, learning process in which traits spread through the population via imitation and new traits emerging via randomized, or other kinds of, adaptation.
