Abstract
People everywhere acquire high levels of conceptual knowledge about their social and natural worlds, which we refer to as ethnoscientific expertise. Evolutionary explanations for expertise are still widely debated. We analysed ethnographic text records (N = 547) describing ethnoscientific expertise among 55 cultures in the Human Relations Area Files to investigate the mutually compatible roles of collaboration, proprietary knowledge, cultural transmission, honest signalling, and mate provisioning. We found relatively high levels of evidence for collaboration, proprietary knowledge, and cultural transmission, and lower levels of evidence for honest signalling and mate provisioning. In our exploratory analyses, we found that whether expertise involved proprietary vs. transmitted knowledge depended on the domain of expertise. Specifically, medicinal knowledge was positively associated with secretive and specialised knowledge for resolving uncommon and serious problems, i.e. proprietary knowledge. Motor skill-related expertise, such as subsistence and technological skills, was positively associated with broadly competent and generous teachers, i.e. cultural transmission. We also found that collaborative expertise was central to both of these models, and was generally important across different knowledge and skill domains.
Highlights
How and why some individuals might pursue relatively high levels of domain-specific conceptual knowledge compared with others within their population, which we will refer to as ethnoscientific expertise. (‘Ethnoscience’ can refer to a particular Western scientific approach to ethnographic research on indigenous knowledge systems (Sturtevant, 1964), which today is usually referred to as cognitive anthropology (Kronenfeld, 2011)
Among experts, a tendency to broadly vs. conditionally share knowledge depends strongly on the type of knowledge/skill domain, i.e. common problems that are solved by acquiring motor skills, vs. rare and serious problems that are solved by acquiring conceptual knowledge
We investigated the extent to which five mutually compatible evolutionary theories of knowledge and skill acquisition could account for ethnoscientific expertise, using 547 ethnographic text records from 55 geographically diverse societies
Summary
Humans are intuitive scientists (Kuhn, 1989; Szollosi & Newell, 2020). People everywhere acquire knowledge about fitness-relevant properties of their social and natural worlds (Albuquerque, Medeiros, & Casas, 2015; Atran, 1993; Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 2000), sort novel stimuli into classification systems (Ellen, 2006; Lakoff, 1987; Ortony & Medin, 1989) and infer patterns and causation from noisy phenomena (Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; Gigerenzer & Murray, 2015; Sperber, Premack, & Premack, 1995). Existing research has focused on the cognitive, social and ecological factors influencing the formation and dissemination of ethnoscientific knowledge, defined as culturally varying and locally useful bodies of conceptual knowledge about the social and natural world (Atran & Medin, 2008; see Heintz, 2007). It is less clear, how and why some individuals might pursue relatively high levels of domain-specific conceptual knowledge compared with others within their population, which we will refer to as ethnoscientific expertise. This is in contrast to our usage, which refers to the content of these indigenous knowledge systems, which are often culturally specific.)
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