ALiCE - Artificial LIfe, Culture and Evolution

UCLA College of Letters and Science, Social Sciences Division, and the UCLA Human Complex Systems Program

Primary contact

Nicholas Gessler
Lecturer
Honors Collegium, Anthropology
(310) 445-1630
gessler@ucla.edu

Project URL

gessler.bol.ucla.edu/

Project description

Empirically, culture comprises individuals, artifacts and groups embedded in social, technological and physical environments, all complexly interacting in simultaneous mutual causation.  Although sharing many commonalities, each individual has a distinct identity and conception of the world, a specific repertoire of experiences, beliefs, perceptions and behaviors.  Each artifact similarly carries information in a distinctive way.  Describing, understanding and explaining culture thus necessitates re-presentations which not only capture this complexity but enact it, thereby enabling the researcher to evaluate suites of theoretical experimental “what-if” scenarios.  We can transcend many of the limits of natural language by expressing our theories of culture in computing languages and studying them through simulations.  Moreover, we can capture evolution itself, the process that created us, and encode it in our simulations.  Thus we now have on our desktops a platform enabling us to explore culture change and the emergence of emergence itself.

Project video