[extropy-chat] fwd: The Genre Evolution Project

[Damien Broderick]

"The Genre Evolution Project is testing the hypothesis that cultural
creations evolve in the same way as biological organisms, that is,
as complex adaptive systems that succeed or fail according to their
fitness to their environment and, by their existence and success,
modify their environment. The project presents many challenges.

- How does one define the key characteristics of a cultural
creation?
- How does one define the key components of the cultural
environment?
- How does one test hypotheses in cultural evolution?

"The Genre Evolution Project began in January, 1998. As a test case,
the GEP currently focuses on science fiction short stories in
America of the 20th century. Membership in the GEP team is arranged
through the principal investigators, Eric Rabkin and Carl Simon.
Individual team members participate either as purely voluntary
researchers or through some more institutionalized mechanism such as
independent study or the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program."

http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo/