Abstract
Cumulative cultural evolution is what made humanity to thrive in various ecological and demographic environments. Solutions to the tasks that humans needed to solve could be mapped onto a task space which could take the form of either closed or open-ended fitness landscape, with the former being modeled more extensively than the latter in studies of cultural evolution. In this article, we modified a simulation by Arthur and Polak (2006) that modeled open-ended fitness landscape by using a computer simulation that builds logical circuits with circuits that were built in earlier trials. We used this simulation to clarify the nature of open-ended fitness landscape and to investigate whether the speed of accumulation of culture is increased by an increase in group size. The results indicated that group size increased the speed of accumulation but is limited than expected. Also, when two types of accumulation, invention and improvement, were distinguished the nature of the two differed. In improvement, the trajectory followed aconvex function with productivity of one agent decreasing as group size increased. In invention, the trajectory showed a continuous pattern of rapid increase followed by a plateau.
Highlights
The accumulation of culture over many generations, or cumulative cultural evolution (Arthur, 2009; Basalla, 1988; Henrich, 2015; Mesoudi, 2011), has led the Homo genus to thrive in many, if not all, regions of our planet
Replication 16 of group size 4 was aborted by memory error, we excluded it from the following results
Since the main results are on inventions and improvement, results for goals and junks are in SI:4. [INSERT TABLE 2 HERE] Basic properties of evolution in group size-1
Summary
The accumulation of culture over many generations, or cumulative cultural evolution (Arthur, 2009; Basalla, 1988; Henrich, 2015; Mesoudi, 2011), has led the Homo genus to thrive in many, if not all, regions of our planet. There exist another interest in the fitness landscape ( called adaptive landscape or design space) of cumulative cultural evolution (Acerbi, Tennie, and Mesoudi, 2015; Miton and Charbonneau, 2018). One that is used above and in most studies of cumulative cultural evolution is closed fitness landscape. Closed fitness landscape refers to a fitness landscape that cannot be altered by the decisions or the actions of an agent solving a task. This implies that all the choices in the fitness landscape can be chosen at any time period. It gives participants the opportunity to find the maximum fitness in the early stages of transmission by mere chance
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