Theory Of Cultural Evolution Research Articles

Introduction

Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible is hardly an obscure film, but it has attracted much controversy and many misconceptions. The goal of this book is to re-examine the film in light of everything Eisenstein wrote about it. The introduction to the roundtable establishes the historical, political, cinematic, biographical, and cultural contexts that shape the book’s multi-disciplinary approach to Eisenstein’s work on Ivan the Terrible. The director structured the story of Ivan’s life and reign in an “interrogative mode” in order to raise profound questions about the nature of violence and tyranny and the psychology of political ambition in Russia’s past, in the Stalinist present, and in the history of state power more broadly. Eisenstein conveyed the history and psychology of power and the inner life of the powerful with a profusion of new cinematic methods that represented the evolution of his thinking about montage. “Polyphonic” montage — the weaving together of audio, visual, sensory, emotional, and intellectual voices—was intended to activate and intensify the spectator’s experience of watching a film; to touch, move, and enlighten the audience in an all-encompassing, transformative way. By approaching Eisenstein’s dynamic theories of history, visual perception, and cultural evolution in relation to one another, this study uncovers a decisive piece: Eisenstein didn’t only want to show the tragic depredations of absolute rule or the universality of power hunger, and he didn’t only want to create a moving emotional experience for viewers.

COVID-19 shifts mortality salience, activities, and values in the United States: Big data analysis of online adaptation.

What is the effect of a life‐threatening pandemic at the societal level? An expanded Theory of Social Change, Cultural Evolution, and Human Development predicts that, during a period of increasing survival threat and decreasing prosperity, humans will shift toward the psychology and behavior typical of the small‐scale, collectivistic, and rural subsistence ecologies in which we evolved. In particular, subjective mortality salience, engagement in subsistence activities, and collectivism will all increase, while the aspiration to be wealthy will decrease. Because coronavirus has forced unprecedented proportions of human activity online, we tested hypotheses derived from the theory by analyzing big data samples for 70 days before and 70 days after the coronavirus pandemic stimulated President Trump to declare a national emergency. Google searches were used for an exploratory study; the exploratory study was followed by three independent replications on Twitter, internet forums, and blogs. Across all four internet platforms, terms related to subjective mortality salience, engagement in subsistence activities, and collectivism showed massive increases. These findings, coupled with prior research testing this theory, indicate that humans may have an evolutionarily conditioned response to the level of death and availability of material resources in society. More specifically, humans may shift their behavior and psychology toward that found in subsistence ecologies under conditions of high mortality and low prosperity or, conversely, toward behavior and psychology found in modern commercial ecologies under conditions of low mortality and high prosperity.

Shifts in ecology, behavior, values, and relationships during the coronavirus pandemic: Survival threat, subsistence activities, conservation of resources, and interdependent families

What are the psychological effects of the coronavirus pandemic? Greenfield's Theory of Social Change, Cultural Evolution, and Human Development predicts that when survival concerns augment, and one's social world narrows toward the family household. life shifts towards activities, values, relationships, and parenting expectations typical of small-scale rural subsistence environments with low life expectancy. Specific predictions were that, during the pandemic, respondents would report intensified survival concerns (e.g., thinking about one's own mortality); increased subsistence activities (e.g., growing food); augmented subsistence values (e.g., conserving resources); more interdependent family relationships (e.g., members helping each other obtain food); and parents expecting children to contribute more to family maintenance (e.g., by cooking for the family). All hypotheses were confirmed with a large-scale survey in California (N = 1,137) administered after about a month of stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic; results replicated in Rhode Island (N = 955). We posited that an experience of increased survival concerns and number of days spent observing stay-at-home orders would predict these shifts. A structural equation model confirmed this hypothesis.

BLIND AND INCREMENTAL OR DIRECTED AND DISRUPTIVE? ON THE NATURE OF NOVEL VARIATION IN HUMAN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

AbstractMany scholars have rejected cultural evolutionary theory on the grounds that cultural variation is directed and intentionally created, rather than incremental and blind with respect to function, as is the case for novel genetic variation in genetic evolution. Meanwhile, some cultural evolution researchers insist that cultural variation is blind and undirected, and the only directional force is selection of randomly-generated variants. Here I argue that neither of these positions are tenable. Cultural variation is directed in various ways. While this does not invalidate cultural evolution, more attention should be paid to the different sources of non-randomness in culturally evolving systems.

Children and innovation: play, play objects and object play in cultural evolution.

Cultural evolutionary theory conceptualises culture as an information-transmission system whose dynamics take on evolutionary properties. Within this framework, however, innovation has been likened to random mutations, reducing its occurrence to chance or fortuitous transmission error. In introducing the special collection on children and innovation, we here place object play and play objects - especially functional miniatures - from carefully chosen archaeological contexts in a niche construction perspective. Given that play, including object play, is ubiquitous in human societies, we suggest that plaything construction, provisioning and use have, over evolutionary timescales, paid substantial selective dividends via ontogenetic niche modification. Combining findings from cognitive science, ethology and ethnography with insights into hominin early developmental life-history, we show how play objects and object play probably had decisive roles in the emergence of innovative capabilities. Importantly, we argue that closer attention to play objects can go some way towards addressing changes in innovation rates that occurred throughout human biocultural evolution and why innovations are observable within certain technological domains but not others.

Global Giving

Why do citizens in some countries take more responsibility for the well-being of others than in other countries? This project seeks to understand the genesis of prosociality, investigating its biological foundations, the influence of cultural traditions, and effects of political, economic and legal structure. The dominant theory in economics views philanthropy as a solution to social illnesses that the market and the state are not solving, a view complementary to political science theory on preferences for government provision. Sociologists focus on social norms emerging from religious traditions. Cultural evolutionary theory highlights the instrumental value of trust. Still other theories have suggested a role for natural selection of genes. However, these theories have not been tested stringently nor simultaneously. Also the project includes a very important factor largely ignored thus far: political, legal and economic institutions also affect the level of giving as well as who gives to which causes. Therefore, the objectives of Global Giving are (1) to map country differences in the size and nature of philanthropy across the world; (2) to develop and test multidisciplinary theories explaining these differences; (3) to facilitate international collaboration across disciplinary boundaries in research on philanthropy. The research draws upon 200 surveys recently harmonized by the PI and on new data on philanthropy to be collected among large samples in 145 countries across all continents. Collaboration with international networks of academics safeguards the validity of the questionnaires and experiments. Appropriate multilevel regression models will be used, the lack of which caused biases in previous research. An integrated understanding of philanthropy is useful not only for theory development, but also for government policy makers and practitioners in nonprofit organizations seeking to mobilize philanthropic contributions and make them more effective. The application in practice is ensured through collaboration with a large network of practitioners.

Crowding out Memetic Explanation

Memes have been proposed to explain wide swathes of human culture and language use. I argue that what is really doing the explanatory work in many of these cases is a basic mechanism of information transmission, which is distinct from memetic evolution by natural selection in significant ways. Perhaps the most significant of these is that information transmission depends primarily on the interests of the users of information, rather than the reproductive interests of the informational entities—‘memes’—themselves. Although my main target is memetic approaches, this argument also applies to some other, nonmemetic, theories of cultural evolution.

Cultural Evolutionary Theory and the Significance of the Biology-Culture Analogy

Throughout the literature on Cultural Evolutionary Theory (CET) attention is drawn to the existence and significance of an analogy between biological phenomena and socio-cultural phenomena (the “biology-culture analogy”). Mesoudi (2017) seems to argue that it is the accuracy of the analogy, and the magnitude of accurate instances of this analogy at work, which provides warrant for an evolutionary approach to the study of socio-cultural phenomena, and, thus, for CET. An implication of this is that if there is evidence to suggest that the analogy is not accurate, or that there aren’t many cases where it is accurate, this would constitute evidence to reject an evolutionary approach to the study of socio-cultural phenomena. As such, opponents of CET raise objections highlighting the weakness of the biology-culture analogy. These objections, in turn, have standard replies in the literature that serve to reinforce the realism of the biology-culture analogy. Curiously, this situation would appear to support a position in the philosophy of social science called “Ontology Matters” (Lauer 2019). It is the view that social ontology can contribute to the empirical success of the social sciences (among which I include CET) by providing an accurate account of what there is in the domain of the social world which can be used to generate better explanations and/or predictions of social phenomena. If ontology matters, in this sense, perhaps this can help to clarify and resolve the dispute regarding the realism of the biology-culture analogy. In turn, perhaps this can help us determine what warrant there is for CET. However, I think this situation is indicative of severe confusion and misunderstanding as to the significance of the biology-culture analogy. This confusion is caused by inattention to two things. First, the useful distinction between it’s methodological, epistemological, and ontological significance. Second, the abstract (ontologically minimalist) nature of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. By drawing attention to these two things, I hope to take the sting out of, and deflate the significance of, disputes regarding the accuracy of the analogy, for both proponents and opponents of CET, as well as to bring into contact a classical dispute in the philosophy of social science with some relevant aspects of theoretical biology.

How cultural evolution can inform the science of science communication\u2014and vice versa

Cultural evolution research is the study of how cultural traits (e.g., beliefs and behavioral patterns) stabilize, change and diffuse in populations, and why some cultural traits are more “attractive” (i.e., more likely to spread) than others. As such, cultural evolution is highly relevant for the emerging “science of science communication” (SSC) in that it can help organize and guide the study of science communication efforts aimed at spreading scientifically accurate information and inspiring behavioral change. Here, I synthesize insights and theory from cultural evolution with central findings and concepts within the SSC with the aim of highlighting the inherent, but underexplored, consilience between these two fields. I demonstrate how cultural evolution can serve as an unifying framework for the SSC and how, conversely, science communication can serve as a fertile testing ground for applying, exploring, and advancing cultural evolutionary theory in a real-world setting that matters. Lastly, I highlight merits and limitations of previous applications of cultural evolution to science communication and conclude with some particularly outstanding questions that emerge at the intersection between cultural evolution and science communication research.

БЕСТИАРИЙ: НЕОВАРВАРСКАЯ ЭНЦИКЛОПЕДИЯ СТРАТЕГИЙ

In the context of Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov’s audacious “lifelong” project, an encyclopedic perspective can be traced quite clearly through various approaches, languages and methodologies throughout the artist’s creative career. Prigov’s Bestiaries not only deviate from the traditional path of encyclopedic genealogy; they are the prototype of later, more pronounced taxonomic projects, and even act as a reference to what he called his “lifelong project”. Our task is to show how the Bestiaries series is not only a study of the Russian cultural space, but is also the very concept of Prigov’s anthropology from the beginning of the history of culture to the present day in a post-Soviet and even post-human perspective, thus asserting itself as a proto-encyclopedia of his New Anthropology. In the process of researching, methods such as theoretical, general philosophical analyses (systemic method, analysis, analogy, synthesis) were used, including the analysis of texts, interviews and artistic production of Prigov. The sociological methods are also taken as the basis for drawing conclusions and the main approach moves from a semiotic and poststructuralist point of view, especially the theory of culture of Yuri Lotman, the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and George Bataille. Thus, we have outlined the importance of the Bestaries in presenting the theory of cultural evolution of Dmitry Prigov and his “new anthropology”, referring to this series on the role of the visual conclusion of his new anthropological system

Traditional craftspeople are not copycats: Potter idiosyncrasies in vessel morphogenesis

Ceramics are quintessential indicators of human culture and its evolution across generations of social learners. Cultural transmission and evolution theory frequently emphasizes apprentices’ need for accurate imitation (high-fidelity copying) of their mentors’ actions. However, the ensuing prediction of standardized fashioning patterns within communities of practice has not been directly addressed in handicraft traditions such as pottery throwing. To fill this gap, we analysed variation in vessel morphogenesis amongst and within traditional potters from culturally different workshops producing for the same market. We demonstrate that, for each vessel type studied, individual potters reliably followed distinctive routes through morphological space towards a much-less-variable common final shape. Our results indicate that mastering the pottery handicraft does not result from accurately reproducing a particular model behaviour specific to the community’s cultural tradition. We provide evidence that, at the level of the elementary clay-deforming gestures, individual learning rather than simple imitation is required for the acquisition of a complex motor skill such as throwing pottery.

The evolution of productive organizations.

Organizations devoted to the production of goods and services, such as guilds, partnerships and modern corporations, have dominated the economic landscape in our species' history. We develop an explanation for their evolution drawing from cultural evolution theory. A basic tenet of this theory is that social learning, under certain conditions, allows for the diffusion of innovations in society and, therefore, the accumulation of culture. Our model shows that these organizations provide such conditions by possessing two characteristics, both prevalent in real world organizations: exclusivity of membership and more effective social learning within their boundaries. The model and its extensions parsimoniously explain the cooperative nature of the social learning advantage, organizational specialization, organizational rigidity and the locus of innovation. We find supportive evidence for our predictions using a sample of premodern societies drawn from the Ethnographic Atlas. Understanding the nature of these organizations informs the debate about their role in society.

Testing the parasite-stress theory of sociality based on the circular model of human values: A multilevel analysis approach

Little research has tested the parasite-stress theory of sociality based on a well-framed model of personal values using a multilevel analysis conducted on multinational samples. To robustly examined the validity of this novel theory of cultural evolution, this study used multilevel data of European Social Survey (from 2002 to 2016, 32 countries, N = 374,730) and World Values Survey (from 2005 to 2014, 80 countries, N = 173,540) to investigate the relationships between pathogen prevalence and the conflicting values dimensions (Conservation versus Openness to change; Self-enhancement versus Self-transcendence) of the circular model of human values, accounting for the micro- (age, sex, religious belief, education, and income) and macro-level predictors (modernization and cultural similarity). Results did not support the parasite-stress theory at both the country and individual levels when controlling for a composite index of modernization. Across all analyses, modernization remained a significant predictor of values even when controlling for cultural similarity. No conclusions changed when using an alternative parasite stress estimate. These findings support the modernization theory of value-change but challenge the roles of infectious diseases in cultural evolution.

The Evolution of Productive Organizations

Organizations devoted to the production of goods and services, such as guilds, partnerships and modern corporations, have dominated the economic landscape in our species’ history. We develop an explanation for their evolution drawing from cultural evolution theory. A basic tenet of this theory is that social learning allows for the diffusion of innovations in society, and therefore, the accumulation of culture. However, the well-known Rogers’ paradox shows that specific conditions are required for social learning to fulfill this role. Using a workhorse cultural evolution model, we show that productive organizations (POs) can provide such conditions if they possess two characteristics: exclusivity of membership –that is, entry is restricted– and more effective social learning within their boundaries than outside. With exclusivity, the benefit of better social learning is not eliminated by the expansion of social learners; instead, these improvements allow for higher adaptiveness, benefiting society. We illuminate three aspects of POs which have eluded mainstream economic theories of POs. First, we focus on culture, a central part of POs; in contrast, current theories assume a pre-existing cultural pool in order to focus on governance. Second, these theories explain how POs work, a proximate explanation; instead, we provide an ultimate explanation that provides a precise mechanisms for their origin and evolution. Third, while our theory parsimoniously produces specialization of POs, current theories require the addition of trade and comparative advantage. The model also illuminates issues regarding organizational rigidity and the locus of innovation.

Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia

Understanding why large, complex human societies have emerged and persisted more readily in certain regions of the world than others is an issue of long-standing debate. Here, we systematically test different hypotheses involving the social and ecological factors that may ultimately promote or inhibit the formation of large, complex human societies. We employ spatially explicit statistical analyses using data on the geographical and temporal distribution of the largest human groups over a 3000-year period of history. The results support the predictions of two complementary hypotheses, indicating that large-scale societies developed more commonly in regions where (i) agriculture has been practiced for longer (thus providing more time for the norms and institutions that facilitate large-scale organisation to emerge), and (ii) warfare was more intense (as proxied by distance from the Eurasian steppe), thus creating a stronger selection pressure for societies to scale up. We found no support for the influential idea that large-scale societies were more common in those regions naturally endowed with a higher potential for productive agriculture. Our study highlights how modern cultural evolutionary theory can be used to organise and synthesise alternative hypotheses and shed light on the ways ecological and social processes have interacted to shape the complex social world we live in today.

Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies

Abstract Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum.

Ritual morphospace revisited: the form, function and factor structure of ritual practice.

Human rituals exhibit bewildering diversity, from the Mauritian Kavadi to Catholic communion. Is this diversity infinitely plastic or are there some general dimensions along which ritual features vary? We analyse two cross-cultural datasets: one drawn from the anthropological record and another novel contemporary dataset, to examine whether a consistent underlying set of latent dimensions in ritual structure and experiences can be detected. First, we conduct a factor analysis on 651 rituals from 74 cultural groups, in which 102 binary variables are coded. We find a reliable set of dimensions emerged, which provide potential candidates for foundational elements of ritual form. Notably, we find that the expression of features associated with dysphoric and euphoric experiences in rituals appears to be largely orthogonal. Second, we follow-up with a pre-registered factor analysis examining contemporary ritual experiences of 779 individuals from Japan, India and the US. We find supporting evidence that ritual experiences are clustered in relatively orthogonal euphoric, dysphoric, frequency and cognitive dimensions. Our findings suggest that there are important regularities in the diversity of ritual expression and experience observed across both time and culture. We discuss the implications of these findings for cognitive theories of ritual and cultural evolution.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.

Homo neanderthalensis and the evolutionary origins of ritual in Homo sapiens.

There is a large, if disparate, body of archaeological literature discussing specific instantiations of symbolic material culture and the possibility of ritual practices in Neanderthal populations. Despite this attention, however, no single synthesis exists that draws upon cognitive, psychological and cultural evolutionary theories of ritual. Here, we review the evidence for ritual-practice among now-extinct Homo neanderthalensis, as well as the necessary cognitive pre-conditions for such behaviour, in order to explore the evolution of ritual in Homo sapiens. We suggest that the currently available archaeological evidence indicates that Neanderthals may have used 'ritualization' to increase the successful transmission of technical knowledge across generations-providing an explanation for the technological stability of the Middle Palaeolithic and attesting to a survival strategy differing from near-contemporary H. sapiens. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.

Evolutionary aspects that guide the cultural transmission pathways in a local medical system in Northeast Brazil

Most of the studies with a focus on pathways and biases of cultural transmission in different domains show that vertical transmission predominates over horizontal and oblique transmission, especially in traits linked to traditions and survival skills, such as local medicine. However, overestimation of the importance of vertical transmission has been an object of methodological criticism. Therefore, a statistical analysis with diachronic perspective may obtain more accurate results. The present study uses an eight-year time frame, as well as synchronous analysis, to study evolutionary aspects that guide the transmission pathways of a local medical system in northeast Brazil. We find that even with vertical transmission being predominant in the learning of information in this cultural domain, the evolutionary implications of this predominance may not be the same as that expected by the theory of cultural evolution. There is a substantial updating of knowledge through horizontal and oblique routes, guided primarily by a model-based bias on prestige and success, which is quite adaptive. Moreover, even when the information is passed vertically, the transmission is much more diffusive than conservative. Indeed, there is a small set of information that remains over time, known as a “structural core,” but new information is aggregated continuously, preparing the system to adapt to new events. By analyzing the transmission routes of knowledge about medicinal plants, this study presents a new perspective on the evolutionary implications of cultural transmission.

Measuring Stability and Change in Personal Culture Using Panel Data

Models of population-wide cultural change tend to invoke one of two broad models of individual change. One approach theorizes people actively updating their beliefs and behaviors in the face of new information. The other argues that, following early socialization experiences, dispositions are stable. We formalize these two models, elaborate empirical implications of each, and derive a simple combined model for comparing them using panel data. We test this model on 183 attitude and behavior items from the 2006 to 2014 rotating panels of the General Social Survey. The pattern of results is complex but more consistent with the settled dispositions model than with the active updating model. Most of the observed change in the GSS appears to be short-term attitude change or measurement error rather than persisting changes. When persistent change occurs, it is somewhat more likely to occur in younger people and for public behaviors and beliefs about high-profile issues than for private attitudes. We argue that we need both models in our theory of cultural evolution but that we need more research on the circumstances under which each is more likely to apply.