Abstract
Beginning with the Price equation, recent work has developed the method of evolutionary decomposition, an exact partitioning of mean phenotypic change into underlying demographic processes. We present a method of evolutionary decomposition for human cultural change, and a demonstration of this method on three centuries of half-decadal census records collected from a simulated island population. By decomposing phenotypic trajectories, we can develop and evaluate suitable hypotheses of the driving mechanisms of cultural evolution.
Highlights
For the last half-century, many anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have independently realized that there is the fundamental connection between evolutionary theory and cultural change (Campbell, 1965; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981; Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Durham, 1992; Lumsden and Wilson, 2005; Dawkins, 2006)
Theorists study how natural selection might favor various capacities for social learning, and how these adaptations in turn affect the evolution of behavior and material technology in a population
We argue here that an evolutionary-demographic approach, similar to Hout et al, is the right one for general analyses of cultural evolution
Summary
For the last half-century, many anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have independently realized that there is the fundamental connection between evolutionary theory and cultural change (Campbell, 1965; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981; Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Durham, 1992; Lumsden and Wilson, 2005; Dawkins, 2006). Following the recent work of evolutionary demographers (Coulson and Tuljapurkar, 2008; Ozgul et al, 2009), we present an equation that decomposes the evolution of any mean character into the contributions of various demographic processes— namely, reproductive success, parent-offspring transmission, death, immigration, individual change, and emigration.
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