Abstract
The consensus among cultural evolutionists seems to be that human cultural evolution is cumulative, which is commonly understood in the specific sense that cultural traits, especially technological traits, increase in complexity over generations. Here we argue that there is insufficient credible evidence in favor of or against this technological complexity thesis. For one thing, the few datasets that are available hardly constitute a representative sample. For another, they substantiate very specific, and usually different versions of the complexity thesis or, even worse, do not point to complexity increases. We highlight the problems our findings raise for current work in cultural-evolutionary theory, and present various suggestions for future research.
Highlights
One aspect of contemporary culture is the rapid advance and diffusion of technologies, many of which—surgical robots, fighter planes, the latest version of your operating system—require highly specialized skills and knowledge toK
The consensus among cultural evolutionists seems to be that human cultural evolution is cumulative, which is commonly understood in the specific sense that cultural traits, especially technological traits, increase in complexity over generations
We focus on one standard way in which this cumulative character has been presented, namely in terms of the complexity of cultural traits, where technologies are taken as primary examples of such complex traits
Summary
One aspect of contemporary culture is the rapid advance and diffusion of technologies, many of which—surgical robots, fighter planes, the latest version of your operating system—require highly specialized skills and knowledge to. Our leading question is whether, irrespective of intuitive appeal, the empirical evidence is sufficiently strong to support or undermine this technological complexity thesis, which holds that cumulative technological complexity is a distinctive characteristic of human cultural evolution. We critically assess the ideas, prominent among cultural evolutionists, that humans are uniquely capable of producing technologies which no single individual could invent alone and are uniquely capable of developing complex technologies We find that both ideas are underdetermined by the available evidence
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