Abstract
The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.
Highlights
Cite this article: Whiten A, Biro D, Bredeche N, Garland EC, Kirby S. 2021 The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines
Their manifestations and mechanisms have been studied across populations of the kinds of non-human animals ( ‘animals’), humans and machines that are the subject matter of this issue. These have been flagged by a variety of expressions across animal and human studies including, for example, ‘consensus decision-making’ [1], ‘the wisdom of the hive’ [2], ‘quorum decision-making’ [3], ‘emergent sensing’ [4], ‘collective intelligence’ [5], ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ [6], ‘collective brain’ [7], ‘group cognition’ and ‘extended mind’ [8,9], ‘group-mindedness’ and ‘collective intentionality’ [10]
We aim to indicate how the contributions relate to our overarching themes of collective knowledge, culture and cultural evolution, as indicated in the reviews above, as well as varied links between them
Summary
The goal of this themed issue and the associated Royal Society and British Academy joint Discussion Meeting is to advance, and bridge between, two topics and their respective research fields that have burgeoned in recent years, to date they have often done so quite separately. One field is concerned with collective action, collective intelligence and collective knowledge among groupings of individuals; phenomena in which significantly more is achieved by the collective than is possible for any one individual alone Their manifestations and mechanisms have been studied across populations of the kinds of non-human animals ( ‘animals’), humans and machines that are the subject matter of this issue. The experiment demonstrated (i) the transmission, across pairings, of information underlying good flight paths generated up to that point; (ii) a capacity of consecutive pairs to share this information, but in interaction, improve it; and thence (iii) create cumulative cultural progress across the whole sequence of repeated replacement pairings How might such processes play out in nature? The authors concluded ‘that ungulates accumulate knowledge of local phenological patterns over time via the ‘ratcheting effect’ wherein each generation augments culturally transmitted information with information gained from their own experience, a process known as cumulative cultural evolution’ ([33, p. 1024], citing [34])
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