ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2015
Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale evolution of programming languages.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- The cultural macroevolution of arcade video games: innovation, collaboration, and collapse.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Idea engines: Unifying innovation & obsolescence from markets & genetic evolution to science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A cultural evolutionary theory that explains both gradual and punctuated change.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- The cultural transmission of tacit knowledge.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- A mechanism for punctuating equilibria during mammalian vocal development.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- From Storytelling to Facebook : Content Biases When Retelling or Sharing a Story.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Testing macroecological theories in cryptocurrency market: neutral models cannot describe diversity patterns and their variation.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- The Random Plots Graph Generation Model for Studying Systems with Unknown Connection Structures.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Evolving complexity: how tinkering shapes cells, software and ecological networks.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The emergence of consensus: a primer.Royal Society open science · 2018Review
- Pursuing Darwin's curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Major transitions in information technology.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The analogies and differences between biological and cultural evolution have been explored by evolutionary biologists, historians, engineers and linguists alike. Two well-known domains of cultural change are language and technology. Both share some traits relating the evolution of species, but technological change is very difficult to study. A major challenge in our way towards a scientific theory of technological evolution is how to properly define evolutionary trees or clades and how to weight the role played by horizontal transfer of information. Here, we study the large-scale historical development of programming languages, which have deeply marked social and technological advances in the last half century. We analyse their historical connections using network theory and reconstructed phylogenetic networks. Using both data analysis and network modelling, it is shown that their evolution is highly uneven, marked by innovation events where new languages are created out of improved combinations of different structural components belonging to previous languages. These radiation events occur in a bursty pattern and are tied to novel technological and social niches. The method can be extrapolated to other systems and consistently captures the major classes of languages and the widespread horizontal design exchanges, revealing a punctuated evolutionary path.
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