Abstract
The science of cultural evolution is unified in its application of evolutionary logic to socially transmitted behavior, but diverse in methodologies and assumptions. Qualitative reviews have encouraged integration by illuminating points of divergence and fostering interaction. This effort would be greatly enhanced by quantitative data on patterns of collaboration and idea sharing in the literature. In the present study, we apply a novel combination of network, cluster, and bibliometric analyses to an extensive dataset of publications on cultural evolution, in order to represent the structure of the field and evaluate the level of disciplinary integration. We first construct a co-authorship network and identify subdisciplines. We then use bibliometric analyses to describe each subdiscipline and investigate trends in collaboration and productivity. Lastly, we assess the topographical distance and degree of citation sharing between subdisciplines, as well as the diversity of subject categories within subdisciplines. Our results reveal an increase in productivity and collaboration over time, albeit a higher inequality in author productivity than expected. Our structural approach reveals research subcommunities with differential levels of integration, citation sharing, and subject diversity. These findings confirm the emergence of a vigorous interdisciplinary field, and indicate ways to foster integration and synthesis in cultural evolution.
Highlights
The study of cultural evolution is an interdisciplinary endeavor that has captivated researchers from a diverse array of fields including evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and computer science
Evolutionary biology is often seen by cultural evolutionists as a reference point in terms of how an interdisciplinary science can be integrated upon a unified theoretical footing (Mesoudi et al 2006)
On the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) website, the participants of the 2015 workshop that inspired the founding of the society are described as coming from a “melting pot of disciplines that need to become integrated to create a science of cultural change informed by evolutionary theory1”
Summary
The study of cultural evolution is an interdisciplinary endeavor that has captivated researchers from a diverse array of fields including evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and computer science. On the CES website, the participants of the 2015 workshop that inspired the founding of the society are described as coming from a “melting pot of disciplines that need to become integrated to create a science of cultural change informed by evolutionary theory1”. The integration of this “melting pot” could help to recontextualize studies from different disciplines to strengthen the field’s empirical base (Mesoudi et al 2006; Henrich et al 2008), and to increase the application of cultural evolutionary knowledge to policy matters (Gibson and Lawson, 2015). As the application of evolutionary logic becomes more popular in the public sphere, the field of cultural evolution will benefit by fostering a stronger, more unified empirical and methodological foundation for evolutionary approaches to sociocultural questions (Smith et al 2001; Mace, 2014)
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