Kwame Asante-Boyd
Kwame is a programmer who reads evolutionary anthropology for fun. He writes about cultural evolution, simulation and agent-based models, and he likes a model small enough to run on paper.
Explainers by Kwame
Systems thinking books for people who study societies
Systems thinking and complexity books by level for readers of anthropology: Meadows on feedback, Mitchell on complexity, Schelling on social models.
Phylogenetic methods for cultural traits: reading history off a language tree
How language trees let researchers reconstruct ancestral customs and test links between traits, with a hand-worked example, cattle and descent, and borrowing.
Small worlds and six degrees: what the folders, the model and the emails showed
Milgram's folders, the Watts and Strogatz rewiring model worked by hand, the 2003 email study, and what six degrees does and does not mean for villages and kin.
Agent-based models in anthropology: growing societies from simple rules
What an agent-based model is, a six-household sharing model to run by hand, the generative idea, Long House Valley and Bali, and how to read a model critically.
Transmission biases: the copying rules behind cultural change
How conformist, prestige and content biases steer what people copy, with the conformity recursion worked by hand and an honest look at the evidence.