Osame Kinouchi et al 2008 New J. Phys. 10 073020 doi:10.1088/1367-2630/10/7/073020
The non-equilibrium nature of culinary evolution
Osame Kinouchi1, Rosa W Diez-Garcia2, Adriano J Holanda1, Pedro Zambianchi3 and Antonio C Roque1,4
Show affiliationsFood is an essential part of civilization, with a scope that ranges from the biological to the economic and cultural levels. Here, we study the statistics of ingredients and recipes taken from Brazilian, British, French and Medieval cookery books. We find universal distributions with scale invariant behaviour. We propose a copy-mutate process to model culinary evolution that fits our empirical data very well. We find a cultural 'founder effect' produced by the non-equilibrium dynamics of the model. Both the invariant and idiosyncratic aspects of culture are accounted for by our model, which may have applications in other kinds of evolutionary processes.
- PACS
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89.75.Hc Networks and genealogical trees
87.23.Ge Dynamics of social systems
- Subjects
- Dates
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Issue 7 (July 2008)
Received 2 April 2008
Published 10 July 2008
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The non-equilibrium nature of culinary evolution
Osame Kinouchi et al 2008 New J. Phys. 10 073020
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Warped Ionized Hydrogen in the Galaxy
J. C. Cersosimo et al. 2009 ApJ 699 469
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