The cognitive reality of causal understanding.

Abstract

Cultural evolutionists have an ambitious agenda. They seek to explain population-level changes in socially learned characteristics using resources from evolutionary biology. The characteristics range from stone tool-use and marriage customs to fairy stories and social media outrage. The resources include modelling techniques from population genetics and assumptions about the innate structure of minds. Starting in the late 1970s, the dominant school of cultural evolution, known as ‘dual inheritance theory’ and the ‘California school’, has argued that individual humans are not especially smart. Our success as a species is founded on our ability to copy one another, faithfully but without much insight. A thriving alternative, known as ‘cultural attraction theory’ and the ‘Paris school’, sees cultural evolution as a more intellectual business, involving ‘reconstruction’ rather than copying. They argue that any improvement in cultural practices is due, not to Darwinian selection where behavioural copying takes the place of genetic replication, but to powerful, innate cognitive processes that enable social learners to interpret and understand observed behaviour [ 1. Clarke E. Heyes C. The swashbuckling anthropologist: Henrich on the secret of our success. Biol. Philos. 2017; 32: 289-305 Crossref Scopus (16) Google Scholar , 2. Sterelny K. Cultural evolution in California and Paris. Stud. Hist. Philos. Sci. Part C. 2017; 62: 42-50 PubMed Google Scholar ]. Representing the Paris school, Osiurak, Claidière, and Federico recently made a compelling case that ‘cumulative technological culture’ (improvements in tool-use) depends on ‘causal understanding’ [ 3. Osiurak F. et al. Bringing cumulative technological culture beyond copying versus reasoning. Trends Cogn. Sci. 2022; (Published online October 22, 2022)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.024 Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (1) Google Scholar ]. Their article underlines the need for better integration between cultural evolution and cognitive science to resolve the issues that divide California from Paris [ 4. Heyes C.M. Enquire within: cultural evolution and cognitive science. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B. 2018; 37320170051 Crossref PubMed Scopus (46) Google Scholar ].