Daniel’s research explores cultural evolutionary thinking around gender and ethnic categories. Why did human societies develop a complex arrangement of social roles and norms? How do these norms generate and sustain oppressive social arrangements? These questions can be explored through computer simulation. Daniel builds simple artificial societies and explores how they develop cultural conventions through processes of interaction and learning.

He’s also interested in methodological questions around computational modeling. Human societies are very complex and computer models are very simple. Those two facts create durable tensions between what we want from models and what they can give us. Specifically, he’s studying whether modeling can alleviate the replication crisis in the behavioral sciences.

You can learn more about his research at https://danielsaundersphilosophy.wordpress.com/

Philosophy of Science, Cultural Evolution, Philosophy of Statistics