Abstract
The ability to build progressively on the achievements of earlier generations is central to human uniqueness, but experimental investigations of this cumulative cultural evolution lack real-world complexity. Here, we studied the dynamics of cumulative culture using a large-scale data set from online collaborative programming competitions run over 14 years. We show that, within each contest population, performance increases over time through frequent ‘tweaks’ of the current best entry and rare innovative ‘leaps’ (successful tweak:leap ratio = 16:1), the latter associated with substantially greater variance in performance. Cumulative cultural evolution reduces technological diversity over time, as populations focus on refining high-performance solutions. While individual entries borrow from few sources, iterative copying allows populations to integrate ideas from many sources, demonstrating a new form of collective intelligence. Our results imply that maximising technological progress requires accepting high levels of failure.
Highlights
16:1), the latter associated with substantially greater variance in performance
‘Cumulative culture’—the build-up of learned knowledge over time—allows populations to construct incrementally improved solutions that could not have been invented by a single individual[2,3,4], often associated with an increase in efficiency, complexity, and diversity[5]
By showing that cumulative culture generates a conformitymimicking homogeneity in behaviour without an explicit conformist bias, and thereby broadening the opportunity for selection between groups to arise, our study sheds new light on the roles that success-biased copying and cultural group selection might play in cultural evolution
Summary
16:1), the latter associated with substantially greater variance in performance. Cumulative cultural evolution reduces technological diversity over time, as populations focus on refining high-performance solutions. ‘Cumulative culture’—the build-up of learned knowledge over time—allows populations to construct incrementally improved solutions that could not have been invented by a single individual[2,3,4], often associated with an increase in efficiency, complexity, and diversity[5]. This unique human accumulation of knowledge is widely thought to rely on a set of cognitive processes that include teaching, language, imitation and prosociality[4,6,7,8], and seems to be facilitated by increased population size and connectivity[9,10,11,12], the underlying causes are not well-understood. Like others using simple tasks like building virtual fishing nets[17] or knot-making[18], are informative, but do not approach the intricacy and richness of real-world cumulative cultural evolution
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