Movatterモバイル変換

Export citation   Bookmark  

The rapid growth ofcultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of theCulturalEvolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation to biologicalevolution and uses key terms (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘social learning’, (...) ‘cumulative culture’) in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified byCulturalEvolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous ‘grand challenges’ emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field ofcultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest tocultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers. (shrink)

No categories

Export citation   Bookmark  

What makes fast, cumulativeculturalevolution work? Where did it come from? Why is it the sole preserve of humans? We set out a self-assembly hypothesis:culturalevolution evolved culturally. We present an evolutionary account that shows this hypothesis to be coherent, plausible, and worthy of further investigation. It has the following steps: (0) in common with other animals, early hominins had significant capacity for social learning; (1) knowledge and skills learned by offspring from their parents (...) began to spread because bearers had more offspring, a process we call CS1 (orCultural Selection 1); (2) CS1 shaped attentional learning biases; (3) these attentional biases were augmented by explicit learning biases (judgements about what should be copied from whom). Explicit learning biases enabled (4) the high-fidelity, exclusive copying required for fastcultural accumulation of knowledge and skills by a process we call CS2 (orCultural Selection 2), and (5) the emergence of cognitive processes such as imitation, mindreading and metacognition – ‘cognitive gadgets’ specialised forcultural learning. This self-assembly hypothesis is consistent with archaeological evidence that the stone tools used by early hominins were not dependent on fast, cumulativeculturalevolution, and suggests new priorities for research on ‘animal culture’. (shrink)

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark   8 citations  

The study ofculturalevolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena ofcultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in theculturalevolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old (...) houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces ofculturalevolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p<0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study ofculturalevolution and architectural transformation in particular. (shrink)

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark   13 citations  

Behavioral genetics andculturalevolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior – largely independent of each other. Here, we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene–environment interactions, we describe thecultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. Acultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as (...) rates of innovation and diffusion, density ofcultural subgroups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of thecultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness.Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels, and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integratedcultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature–nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   6 citations  

I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ are a product ofculturalevolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human (...) forms of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of thecultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of theculturalevolution of mental state talk. (shrink)

Direct download(8 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   13 citations  

A model of a spatio-cultural sub-context (enfolded in a wider scope context) is presented in the form of a blue print of a Complex System with a two-stage decision engine at its core. The engine first attaches a meaning to analyzable datum, and then decides whether to keep or change it. It does not alter already stored meanings but is designed to search for data to be converted into additional stored meanings and improve the accuracy of correspondence of their (...) spatial andcultural range of relevance. Meaning is reduced to the choice of a strategy—a future continuum of events; a choice dependent on a unique Evolutionary Path, a past continuum of events specific enough to lead to the current temporarily stable state of a spatio-cultural category. It is a blue print for a program that can emulate decisions to initiate changes in the environment in which a collective of culture partners resides; changes consisting of movements from one location to another or in the layout of its current location. The model is proposed at a lowcultural resolution and is applicable, after suitable modifications, to a majority of city/period pairs. However, any such model has to be city/period specific. It is illustrated with a design for analyzing changes in the Israeli city, in particular in Tel Aviv. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Christiansen & Chater's (C&C's) argument rests on an assumption that convergentculturalevolution can produce similar (complex) behaviours in isolated populations. In this commentary, I describe how experiments recently carried out by Caldwell and colleagues can contribute to the understanding of such phenomena.

Direct download(7 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Uchiyama et al. provide a theoretical framework to explain the gap between reported gene–environment interactions and real-life epidemiological statistics. Throughculturalevolution, informed behavioral approaches mitigate the impact of environmental risk on disease onset. Similarly, here we propose that fostering certain behavioral traits, transmitted culturally or through access to scientific knowledge, could confer resilience to mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Many of the most important properties of human groups – including properties that may give one group an evolutionary advantage over another – are properly defined only at the level of group organization. Yet at present, most work on theevolution of culture has focused solely on the transmission of individual-level traits. I propose a conceptual extension of the theory ofculturalevolution, particularly related to the evolutionary competition betweencultural groups. The key concept in this (...) extension is the emergent group-level trait. This type of trait is characterized by the structured organization of differentiated individuals and constitutes a unit of selection that is qualitatively different from selection on groups as defined by traditional multilevel selection theory. As a corollary, I argue that the traditional focus on cooperation as the defining feature of human societies has missed an essential feature of cooperative groups. Traditional models of cooperation assume that interacting with one cooperator is equivalent to interacting with any other. However, human groups involve differential roles, meaning that receiving aid from one individual is often preferred to receiving aid from another. In this target article, I discuss the emergence andevolution of group-level traits and the implications for the theory ofculturalevolution, including ramifications for theevolution of human cooperation, technology, andcultural institutions, and for the equivalency of multilevel selection and inclusive fitness approaches. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   34 citations  

Bentley et al.’s two-dimensional conceptual map is complementary toculturalevolution research that has sought to explain population-levelcultural dynamics in terms of individual-level behavioral processes. Here, I qualify their scheme by arguing that different social learning biases should be treated distinctly, and that the transparency of decisions is sometimes conflated with the actual underlying payoff structure of those decisions.

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose acultural evolutionary theory to explain why shamanism consistently develops and, in particular, (1) why shamanic traditions exhibit recurrent features around (...) the world; (2) why shamanism professionalizes early, often in the absence of other specialization; and (3) how shifting social conditions affect the form or existence of shamanism. According to this theory, shamanism is a set of traditions developed throughculturalevolution that adapts to people's intuitions to convince observers that a practitioner can influence otherwise unpredictable, significant events. The shaman does this by ostensibly transforming during initiation and trance, violating folk intuitions of humanness to assure group members that he or she can interact with the invisible forces that control uncertain outcomes. Entry requirements for becoming a shaman persist because the practitioner's credibility depends on his or her “transforming.” This contrasts with dealing with problems that have identifiable solutions (such as building a canoe), in which credibility hinges on showing results and outsiders can invade the jurisdiction by producing the outcome. Shamanism is an ancient human institution that recurs because of the capacity ofculturalevolution to produce practices adapted to innate psychological tendencies. (shrink)

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   18 citations  

Key to Steve Fuller’s recent defense of intelligent design is the claim that it alone can explain why science is even possible. By contrast, Fuller argues that Darwinian evolutionary theory posits a purposeless universe leaving humans with no motivation to study science and no basis for modifying an underlying reality. I argue that this view represents a retreat from insights about knowledge within Fuller’s own program of social epistemology. I argue for a Darwinian picture of science as a product of (...)culturalevolution building upon biological capabilities and liabilities bequeathed to us by biologicalevolution. Dual Inheritance or Gene-Culture Coevolution Theory can help us understand how complex social institutions emerged out of distinct, if connected, processes of biological andculturalevolution. Only by understanding how the unnatural nature of modern science emerged throughculturalevolution can we consider where modern science functions well or poorly. (shrink)

Direct download(5 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   3 citations  

It is common in attempts to extend the theory ofevolution to culture to generalize from the causal basis of biologicalevolution, so that evolutionary theory becomes the theory of copying processes. Generalizing from the formal dynamics ofevolution allows greater leeway in what kinds of thingscultural entities can be, if they are to evolve. By understanding the phenomenon ofcultural transmission in terms of coordinated phenotypic variability, we can have a theory of (...) class='Hi'>culturalevolution which allows us to avoid the various difficulties with the elaboration of informational entities such as thecultural replicator, or meme. Such an account is a boon to the project of evolutionary epistemology since it confirms the presumption in favor of the general adaptiveness of culture, illuminating rather than obscuring the inherent intimacy of our relationship to (e.g.) our ideas. (shrink)

Direct download(5 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   9 citations  

This article argues that it is possible to bring the social sciences into evolutionary focus without being committed to a thesis the author calls ontological reductionism, which is a widespread predilection for lower-level explanations. After showing why we should reject ontological reductionism, the author argues that there is a way to construeculturalevolution that does justice to the autonomy of social science explanations. This paves the way for a liberal approach to explanation the author calls explanatory pluralism, (...) which allows for the possibility of explainingcultural phenomena in terms of different evolutionary processes. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   10 citations  

The end of the twentieth century marks the slow disintegration of both the Marxist and capitalist socioeconomic theories, inasmuch as both have proven inadequate to meet basic issues of human existence. Their inadequacy rests on the tendency to use the criteria of extrinsic rewards, quantification, production, and consumption to evaluate human personhood and human activity. What is needed is a third alternative to these two systems, one that is based on intrinsic rewards and cultivates internal values rather than production, consumption, (...) and quantification. Religious communities have traditionally been such an alternative and seem to represent an ordered nucleus of information that can counter the inadequacies of Marxism and capitalism. To carry out this function, religions must (1) minimize the trivial differences that set belief systems against one another; (2) support bimodalculturalevolution that allows the old and the new to coexist; and (3) discover the unifying factors that cut across human groups. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

The bifocal stance theory (BST) focuses onculturalevolution without alluding to associated processes in linguisticevolution and language use. The authors briefly comment on language acquisition but leave underexplored the applicability of BST to linguisticevolution, to changes of language representations, and to possible consequences for constructing social identity, based on, for example, collective resilience processes within language communities.

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Haspelmath argues that linguists who conduct comparative research and try to explain patterns that are general across languages can only consider two sources of these patterns: convergentculturalevolution of languages, which provides functional explanations of these phenomena, or innate building blocks for syntactic structure, specified in the human cognitive system. This paper claims that convergentculturalevolution and functional-adaptive explanations are not sufficient to explain the existence of certain crosslinguistic phenomena. The argument is based on (...) comparative evidence of generalizations based on Rizzi and Cinque's theories of cartographic syntax, which imply the existence of finely ordered and complex innate categories. I argue that these patterns cannot be explained in functional-adaptive terms alone. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Cultural transmission in non-literate societies (including that of Homer) is first discussed, partly to test some theories of Dan Sperber, and partly to consider thetheory of memes, which is sometimes held applicable to Homeric formulae, and is considered next. After discussing Sperber's criticism of memeticism, I turn toSperber's susceptibility theory of culture, and his discussions of religion and of music. Further examples drawn from Homeric religion are found to be in tension with aspects of this theory. Two diverse interpretations (...) of susceptibility present in Sperber's text are elicited and contrasted, of which one is criticised and the other welcomed as consistent with the role of reflection, artifice and rationality in the development of culture, activities that theories of culture cannot afford to disregard. (shrink)

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   1 citation  

The article addresses the question whether culture evolves in a Lamarckian manner. I highlight three central aspects of a Lamarckian concept ofevolution: the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the transformational pattern ofevolution, and the concept of directed changes. A clear exposition of these aspects shows that a system can be a Darwinian variational system instead of a Lamarckian transformational one, even if it is based on inheritance of acquired characteristics and/or on Lamarckian directed changes. On this basis, (...) I apply the three aspects to culture. Taking for granted that culture is a variational system, based on selection processes, I discuss in detail the senses in whichcultural inheritance can be said to be Lamarckian and in which sense problem solving, a major factor incultural change, leads to directed variation. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   18 citations  

This study explores theculturalevolution of finance through the analysis of monetary incentives and their impact on financial innovation. Through an interdisciplinary approach, it investigates how financial practices have changed due to economic andcultural pressures, and how these changes have driven new forms of innovation in global financial markets. The results reveal that monetary incentives play a crucial role in theevolution of financial structures, promoting the adoption of new technologies and financial products that (...) have transformed the global economy. This article highlights the importance of understanding the interplay between culture and finance in order to anticipate future trends in the industry. (shrink)

No categories

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

In recent work, Atran, Henrich, Norenzayan and colleagues developed an account of religion that reconciles insights from the ‘by-product’ accounts and the adaptive accounts. According to their synthesis, the process ofcultural group selection driven by group competition has recruited our proclivity to adopt and spread religious beliefs and engage in religious practices to increase within group solidarity, harmony and cooperation. While their account has much merit, I believe it only tells us half the story of how institutional religions (...) have evolved. Theircultural evolutionary account of religion only looks at thecultural dynamics arising from competition between groups, not at the dynamics arising from within the group. Drawing from game-theoretic analyses of the emergence andculturalevolution of social institutions, I outline two sets of important ‘within-group’ dynamics that shape institutional religions. The first follow from the necessity to keep the interaction of the participants in an equilibrium state in order to maintain the social institution. The second arise from the competition of institutional features for traction within the group. Bringing these dynamics into account enables us to explain prominent features of institutional religions that cannot be satisfactorily explained by the current model of theculturalevolution of religions. (shrink)

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark   2 citations  

We develop acultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology andcultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays (...) of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particularcultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term,cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate. (shrink)

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   94 citations  

Tim Lewens aims to understand what it means to take an evolutionary approach tocultural change, and why it is that these approaches are sometimes treated with suspicion. While making a case for the value of evolutionary thinking for students of culture, he shows why the concerns of sceptics should not dismissed as mere prejudice, confusion, or ignorance. Indeed, confusions about what evolutionary approaches entail are propagated by their proponents, as well as by their detractors. By taking seriously the (...) problems faced by these approaches to culture, he shows how such approaches can be better formulated, where their most significant limitations lie, and how the tools ofcultural evolutionary thinking might become more widely accepted. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   41 citations  

A view ofevolution is presented in this paper (a two paper series), intended as a methodological infrastructure for modeling spatio-cultural systems (the design outline of such a model is presented in paper II). A motivation for the re-articulation ofevolution as information dynamics is the phenomenologically discovered prerequisite of embedding a meaning-attributing apparatus in any and all models of spatio-cultural systems. Anevolution is construed as the dynamics of a complex system comprised of memory (...) devices, connected in an ordered fashion (not randomly) by information-exchanges. An information-exchange transpires when the recipient system adopts a strategy (a continuum of events) that eventually changes its structure; namely, after the exchange, it contains and conveys different information. These memory devices—sub-systems—are also similarly constructed complex system. Only a part of the information is retained by a system in its physical-memory storage, which eventually loses this function too, when the ability to retrieve a common enough structure is lost. The entire amount of information is a system’s structure of connections (information exchanges); it is contained (apparently stored) dynamically when a system is observed in a temporarily stable state. This temporary permanence—robustness and resilience—is attained dynamically; namely, enabled by changes taking place in its sub-systems and in each of their sub-systems. Therefore, for modeling such a system a multi-layer/multi-scale approach is preferable. It enables the addition and subtraction of an interim scale and the consideration of such a scale as a micro or a macro (thus initiating a maneuver up or down scale) according to an ad-hoc requirement of the model, which imitates an envisaged sub system (called an ‘Inner World’), to which a certain range of decisions is relegated. This dynamics is driven (in time) by dynamically originated information growth, as defined by Shannon; i.e. by the fact that each of certain state transitions have occurred sometime in the past of the system just so and not otherwise, and by the fact that they have occurred in a certain order. Therefore, each ‘history’ and memory retrieval availability of information is unique, and thus can be used to differentiate meanings. Hence, there cannot be a comprehensive solution to the meaning attribution model-design challenge. However, the observation that at the core of each envisaged complex system, moving in time according to a rounded logic, there is an information manipulating device, operating necessarily according to a Boolean logic, can be copied into the design of a model. This observation enables, therefore, the embedding of a specific, locally fitted, meaning attributing device, which is an information manipulating mechanism (it splices/attaches one segment of information to another—its meaning). However, this is just a framework; the actual solution has still to be found locally—for each subject system. Such a solution is demonstrated for the change in location or layout in the Israeli city in paper II. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

This paper addresses the question of how to understand the relationship betweenCultural Evolutionary Science and the social sciences, given that they coexist and both studycultural change. I argue that CES is best understood as having a unificatory or integrative role between evolutionary biology and the social sciences, and that it is best characterized as a bridge field; I describe the concept of a bridge field and how it relates to other non-reductionist accounts of unification or integration (...) used in the philosophy of science literature. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Experiments may contribute to understanding the basic processes ofculturalevolution. We drew features from previous laboratory research with small groups in which traditions arose during several generations. Groups of four participants chose by consensus between solving anagrams printed on red cards and on blue cards. Payoffs for the choices differed. After 12 min, the participant who had been in the experiment the longest was removed and replaced with a naı¨ve person. These replacements, each of which marked the (...) end of a generation, continued for 10 – 15 generations, at which time the day’s session ended. Time-out duration, which determined whether the group earned more by choosing red or blue, and which was fixed for a day’s session, was varied across three conditions to equal 1, 2, or 3 min. The groups developed choice traditions that tended toward maximizing earnings. The stronger the dependence between choice and earnings, the stronger was the tradition. Once a choice tradition evolved, groups passed it on by instructing newcomers, using some combination of accurate information, mythology, and coercion. Among verbal traditions, frequency of mythology varied directly with strength of the choice tradition. These methods may be applied to a variety of research questions. D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark   9 citations  

In this article, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and nature of the final stage of theevolution of full human language, the transition from so-called “protolanguage” to language, and on the origins of a simple protolanguage with structure and displaced reference; a proposal that depends on the idea that the initial expansion of communicative powers in our lineage involved a much expanded role for gesture and mime. But though it defends a substantive proposal, the article also (...) defends and illustrates a methodological proposal too. I argue that language is a special case of a more general phenomenon—cumulativeculturalevolution—and while we rarely have direct information about communication, we have more direct information about the cumulativeculturalevolution of technical skill, ecological strategies, and social complexity. These same factors also enable us to make a reasonable estimate of the intergenerational social learning capacities of these communities and of the communicative demands these communities face. For example, we can, at least tentatively, identify forms of cooperation that are stable only if third party information is transmitted widely, cheaply, and accurately. So we can use these more direct markers of information accumulation to locate, in broad terms, the period in our evolutionary history during which we became lingual. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   15 citations  

Various disciplines, including evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, and psychology, have studied theevolution of rituals. Archaeologists have typically argued that burial practices are one of the most prominent manifestations of ritual practices in the past and have explored various aspects of burial practices, including burial directions. One of the important hypotheses on theculturalevolution of burial practices in Japan is the kitamakura hypothesis, which claims that burial directions (including Kofuns and current burials) were intended to be (...) oriented toward the north after the Kofun period under the influence of Confucianism or Buddhism. This hypothesis would be more plausible if burial directions were not oriented northward before the Kofun period. This research focused on the burial directions in the northern Kyūshū area of the Yayoi period, i.e., the directions of the kamekan jar burials. The results are almost consistent with the hypothesis, although one notable exception is found, and its possible interpretations and implications are discussed. (shrink)

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark  

The 29 commentaries amplified our key arguments; offered extensions, implications, and applications of the framework; and pushed back and clarified. To help forge the path forward forcultural evolutionary behavioral genetics, we (1) focus on conceptual disagreements and misconceptions about the concepts of heritability and culture; (2) further discuss points raised about the intertwined relationship between culture and genes; and (3) address extensions to the proposed framework, particularly as it relates tocultural clusters, development, and power. These commentaries, (...) and the deep engagement they represent, reinforce the importance of integratingculturalevolution and behavioral genetics. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Critics of Darwinianculturalevolution frequently assert that whereas biologicalevolution is blind and undirected,cultural change is directed or guided by people who possess foresight, thereby invalidating any Darwinian analysis of culture. Here I show this argument to be erroneous and unsupported in several respects. First, critics commonly conflate human foresight with supernatural clairvoyance, resulting in the premature rejection of Darwinianculturalevolution on false logical grounds. Second, the presence of foresight is perfectly (...) consistent with Darwinianevolution, and is found in biology, in the form of open, teleonomic processes such as genetically-biased behavioural learning. Finally, empirical evidence from the social sciences suggests thatcultural change appears far less guided and directed, and human foresight far less accurate, than is commonly assumed. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   14 citations  

Is theculturalevolution of morality fairly contingent? Couldculturalevolution have easily led humans to moral norms and judgments that are mostly false by our present lights? If so, does it matter philosophically? Yes, or so we argue. We empirically motivate the contingency ofculturalevolution and show that it makes two major philosophical contributions. First, it shows that moral objectivists cannot explain the reliability of our moral judgments and thus strengthens moral debunking (...) arguments. Second, it shows that the reliability of our moral judgments is evidence for theism over metaphysical naturalism. (shrink)

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   4 citations  

No categories

Export citation   Bookmark  

Culturalevolution is normally framed in informational terms. However, it is not clear whether this is an adequate way to modelcultural evolutionary phenomena and what, precisely, “information” is supposed to mean in this context. Wouldcultural evolutionary theory benefit from a well-developed theory ofcultural information? The prevailing sentiment is that, in contradistinction to biology, informational language should be used nontechnically in this context for descriptive, but not explanatory, purposes. Against this view, this article (...) makes the case for the need to take a proper biology-based “informational turn” in thecultural evolutionary sciences. I argue that the current vague use of informational language misses out on the potential benefits for advancing understanding of phenomena that information-theoretic reasoning has provided in other sciences, especially genetics. In particular, by emphasizing the informational aspects ofcultural evolutionary processes, this approach can clarify some conceptual and methodological problems that have plaguedcultural evolutionary theory since its inception, including (1) how to determine the channel conditions ofcultural information flow, (2) the nature and scope ofcultural information, and (3) how to quantify trends ofcultural cumulation. More generally, theories ofculturalevolution will be incomplete until the mechanisms underlyingcultural processes are better understood and integrated into the explanations. This article explores the adequacy of an information-theoretic framework to accomplish these purposes. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Culturalevolution may be even more prolific in the generation of new forms than is biologicalevolution – especially when it takes the form of creative genius. Yet evolutionary theories have tended to overlook the factors that might select for outstanding individual creativity. A recent dual-inheritance theory is outlined and then integrated with the niche-construction theory of Laland et al.

Direct download(7 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches toculturalevolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptiveevolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread ofcultural representations; (4) the “cultural fitness” of a mental representation can (...) be inferred from its successful transmission; and (5) selective forces only matter if the sources of variation are random. We close by sketching the outlines of a unified evolutionary science of culture. (shrink)

Direct download(7 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   71 citations  

According tocultural evolutionary theory in the tradition of Boyd and Richerson,culturalevolution is driven by individuals' learning biases, natural selection, and random forces. Learning biases lead people to preferentially acquirecultural variants with certain contents or in certain contexts. Natural selection favors individuals or groups with fitness-promoting variants. Durham (1991) argued that Boyd and Richerson's approach is based on a "radical individualism" that fails to recognize thatcultural variants are often "imposed" on people (...) regardless of their individual decisions. Fracchia and Lewontin (2005) raised a similar challenge, suggesting that the success of a variant is often determined by the degree of power backing it. With power, a ruler can impose beliefs or practices on a whole population by diktat, rendering all of the forces represented incultural evolutionary models irrelevant. It is argued here, based on work by Boehm (1999, 2012), that, from at least the time of the early Middle Paleolithic, human bands were controlled by powerful coalitions of the majority that deliberately guided the development of moral norms to promote the common good.Cultural evolutionary models of theevolution of morality have been based on false premises. However, Durham (1991) and Fracchia and Lewontin's (2005) challenge does not underminecultural evolutionary modeling in nonmoral domains. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   2 citations  

Xunzi 荀子 provided naturalistic answers to questions regarding human sociality and our characteristic “groupishness” (qun 羣). Central to his theories were so-called “social divisions and righteousness” (fenyi 分義), which can be interpreted as a uniquely human package of “cultural technology” produced viaculturalevolution to suppress intragroup conflict stemming from what Xunzi calls “the mind of covetous comparison” (liangyi zhi xin 兩疑之心). For Xunzi, fenyi is the uniquely human attribute which kickstarts a salutary causal chain which facilitates (...) prosociality and the upscaling of cooperation, and ultimately results in human ecological dominance. This essay will argue that an incipient form ofculturalevolution is discoverable in the Xunzi, and moreover that a solution to the problem of the origin of the “ritual and righteousness” (liyi 禮義)cultural package derives neatly from the incipientculturalevolution of the Xunzi. That is to say, while this solution is not explicitly adduced in the Xunzi, it is nonetheless consistent with Xunzian ideas and is an improvement on the much-lambasted solution Xunzi actually gives, according to which “the former kings hated … chaos, and so they established rituals and righteousness.”. (shrink)

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   1 citation  

Language maps signals onto meanings through the use of two distinct types of structure. First, the space of meanings is discretized into categories that are shared by all users of the language. Second, the signals employed by the language are compositional: The meaning of the whole is a function of its parts and the way in which those parts are combined. In three iterated learning experiments using a vast, continuous, open-ended meaning space, we explore the conditions under which both structured (...) categories and structured signals emerge ex nihilo. While previous experiments have been limited to either categorical structure in meanings or compositional structure in signals, these experiments demonstrate that when the meaning space lacks clear preexisting boundaries, more subtle morphological structure that lacks straightforward compositionality—as found in natural languages—may evolve as a solution to joint pressures from learning and communication. (shrink)

Direct download(5 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   12 citations  

No categories

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Direct download(5 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   1 citation  

In this book, Kate Distin proposes a theory ofculturalevolution and shows how it can help us to understand the origin and development of human culture. Distin introduces the concept that humans share information not only in natural languages, which are spoken or signed, but also in artefactual languages like writing and musical notation, which use media that are made by humans. Languages enable humans to receive and transmit variations incultural information and resources. In this (...) way, they provide the mechanism forculturalevolution. The human capacity for metarepresentation - thinking about how we think - acceleratesculturalevolution, because it freescultural information from the conceptual limitations of each individual language. Distin shows how the concept ofculturalevolution outlined in this book can help us to understand the complexity and diversity of human culture, relating her theory to a range of subjects including economics, linguistics, and developmental biology. (shrink)

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark   7 citations  

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark  

(1991). Cooperation, competition, and gylany:Culturalevolution from a new dynamic perspective. World Futures: Vol. 31, Cooperation: Toward a Post-Modern Ethic, pp. 169-179.

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   1 citation  

Culturalevolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy betweencultural and geneticevolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to whichcultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated (...) with the notion of “cultural attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility betweencultural attraction and standardculturalevolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whethercultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructivecultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research inculturalevolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   38 citations  

Recent years have seen the growing promise ofcultural evolutionary theory as a new approach to bringing human behaviour fully within the broader evolutionary synthesis. This review of two recent seminal works on this topic argues thatculturalevolution now holds the potential to bring together fields as disparate as neuroscience and social anthropology within a unified explanatory and ontological framework.

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   3 citations  

No categories

Export citation   Bookmark  

Cushman argues that the function of rationalization is to attribute mental representations to ourselves, thereby making these representations available for future planning. I argue that such attribution is often not necessary and sometimes maladaptive. I suggest a different explanation of rationalization: making representations available to other agents, to facilitate cooperation, transmission, and the ratchet effect that underlies cumulativeculturalevolution.

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   2 citations