Theory Of Cultural Evolution Research Articles

Sexual selection of conspicuous consumption

Recently, a number of papers draw upon ideas from sexual selection and costly signaling theory to argue that conspicuous consumption has evolved as a sexually selected mating strategy. I outline what are considered to be the criteria for arguing that a trait is the outcome of sexual selection and I explore whether conspicuous consumption is sexual adaptation. Though I share the insight that evolutionary theory can contribute to our understanding of consumption behavior, I argue that existing evolutionary explanations of conspicuous consumption do not examine human evolved psychology and available evidence about past environments. I further argue that cultural evolution theory provides an alternative explanation of conspicuous consumption in modern environments. In particular, conspicuous consumption is understood as a pattern of behavior marked by specific social learning mechanisms. Such an approach reflects the analytical tools of cultural evolution theory and provides a classification of cognitive factors involved in consumption choices.

In Service to Others: A New Evolutionary Perspective on Human Enhancement.

In enhancement ethics, evolutionary theory has been largely perceived as supporting liberal views on enhancement, in which decisions to enhance are predominantly regulated by the principle of individual autonomy. In this article, I critique this perception in light of recent scientific developments. Cultural evolutionary theory suggests a picture in which individual interests are entangled with community interests, and this undermines the applicability of the principle of autonomy. This is particularly relevant for enhancement ethics given how-I argue-decisions to enhance are often influenced by desires to increase social status. The service view on enhancement, based on principles of service and trust, offers, I propose, better guidance for the challenges of social living.

Maintenance of prior behaviour can enhance cultural selection

Many cultural phenomena evolve through a Darwinian process whereby adaptive variants are selected and spread at the expense of competing variants. While cultural evolutionary theory emphasises the importance of social learning to this process, experimental studies indicate that people’s dominant response is to maintain their prior behaviour. In addition, while payoff-biased learning is crucial to Darwinian cultural evolution, learner behaviour is not always guided by variant payoffs. Here, we use agent-based modelling to investigate the role of maintenance in Darwinian cultural evolution. We vary the degree to which learner behaviour is payoff-biased (i.e., based on critical evaluation of variant payoffs), and compare three uncritical (non-payoff-biased) strategies that are used alongside payoff-biased learning: copying others, innovating new variants, and maintaining prior variants. In line with previous research, we show that some level of payoff-biased learning is crucial for populations to converge on adaptive cultural variants. Importantly, when combined with payoff-biased learning, uncritical maintenance leads to stronger population-level adaptation than uncritical copying or innovation, highlighting the importance of maintenance to cultural selection. This advantage of maintenance as a default learning strategy may help explain why it is a common human behaviour.

Sociological limits and prospects of contemporary cultural evolutionary theory

AbstractWhat can sociology learn about the logic of social behaviour from the field of cultural evolution? How can sociology enrich cultural evolutionary theory? In this article, I present and examine cultural evolutionary theory by specifying its various proposed mechanisms, such as cultural drift, biased transmission and cultural selection (including cultural group selection), and by investigating concrete examples of social phenomena to which the theory has been applied. My findings are three‐fold. First, cultural evolutionary mechanisms should not be dismissed by sociologists but instead, given their strong explanatory power in certain cases, incorporated into their basic theoretical toolkit. Second, one mechanism, i.e. cultural selection, can even underpin a more nuanced and micro‐founded sociological functionalism that avoids some of the errors of structural functionalism. This, however, should not be celebrated too soon as the applicability of cultural selection is more limited than cultural evolutionists acknowledge. Third, drawing on historical sociology and comparative politics I also uncover further important sociological limitations of the cultural evolutionary approach that should be heeded by the latter. I focus on two: (1) its inapplicability to cases of intentional decision‐making and strategizing, and (2) its inability to subsume the phenomenon of social power.

Cultural similarity among coreligionists within and between countries

Cultural evolutionary theories suggest that world religions have consolidated beliefs, values, and practices within a superethnic cultural identity. It follows that affiliation with religious traditions would be reliably associated with global variation in cultural traits. To test this hypothesis, we measured cultural distance between religious groups within and between countries, using the Cultural Fixation Index ([Formula: see text]) applied to the World Values Survey (88 countries, n = 243,118). Individuals who shared a religious tradition and level of commitment to religion were more culturally similar, both within and across countries, than those with different affiliations and levels of religiosity, even after excluding overtly religious values. Moreover, distances between denominations within a world religion echoed shared historical descent. Nonreligious individuals across countries also shared cultural values, offering evidence for the cultural evolution of secularization. While nation-states were a stronger predictor of cultural traits than religious traditions, the cultural similarity of coreligionists remained robust, controlling for demographic characteristics, geographic and linguistic distances between groups, and government restriction on religion. Together, results reveal the pervasive cultural signature of religion and support the role of world religions in sustaining superordinate identities that transcend geographical boundaries.

Socially Situated Transmission: The Bias to Transmit Negative Information is Moderated by the Social Context

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large-scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals.

The new science of religious change.

Humans have believed in gods and spirits since the earliest days of the Holocene, and many people still believe in them today. Although the existence of religious belief has been a human constant, the nature and prevalence of religion has changed dramatically throughout human history. Here we describe the emerging science of religious change. We first outline a multilevel framework for studying religious change drawn from theories of socioecological psychology and cultural evolution. We illustrate this framework with four case studies featuring two ancient religious changes (the rise of punitive religions and doctrinal rituals) and two modern religious changes (the rise of atheism and nontraditional religions). We then review useful methods for examining religious change, including ethnographic coding, agent-based modeling, and time-series analysis. Next, we explore future directions, highlighting the need for predictive forecasts, nonlinear models, and non-Western samples. We also outline ten key questions that need to be answered for a fuller understanding of religious change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Towards a Pricean foundation for cultural evolutionary theory

The Price equation is currently considered one of the fundamental equations —or even the fundamental equation— of evolution. In this article, we explore the role of this equation within cultural evolutionary theory. More specifically, we use it to account for the explanatory power and the theoretical structure of a certain generalised version of dual-inheritance theory. First, we argue that, in spite of not having a definite empirical content, the Price equation offers a suitable formalisation of the processes of cultural evolution, and provides a powerful heuristic device for discovering the actual causes of cultural change and accumulation. Second, we argue that, as a consequence of this, a certain version of the Price equation is the fundamental law of cultural evolutionary theory. In order to support this claim, we sketch the ideal structure of dual-inheritance theory and we stress the unificatory role that the Price equation plays in it.

On the Vernacular Language Games of an Antagonistic Online Subculture.

In this paper we develop an empirical, big data approach to analyze how alt-right vernacular concepts (such as kek and beta) were used on the notorious anonymous and ephemeral imageboard 4chan/pol/and the fan wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica. While 4chan/pol/is broadly regarded as an influential source of many of the web’s most successful memes such as Pepe the Frog, Encyclopedia Dramatica functions as a kind of satirical Wikipedia for this meme subculture, written in high concept and highly offensive vernacular style. While the site’s affordances make them distinct, they are connected by a subcultural style and politics that has recently become increasingly connected with violent right-wing activism, forming a loose subcultural language community. Contrary to “memetic” theories of cultural evolution in media studies, our analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from poststructuralist and pragmatist philosophies of language and deploys empirical techniques from corpus linguistics to consider the role of online platforms in shaping these vernacular modes of expression. This approach helps us to identify instances of vernacular innovation within these corpora from 2012-2020—a period during which the white supremacist “alt-right” movement arose online. Through these analyses we contribute both to ongoing interdisciplinary attempts to bridge the gap between cultural-theoretical and computational-linguistic approaches to studying online subcultures, and to the empirical study of the vernacular roots of the “toxic memes” that appear to be an increasingly common feature on social media.

When does it pay to follow the crowd? Children optimize imitation of causally irrelevant actions performed by a majority

Cultural evolutionary theory posits that human cultural complexity rests on a set of adaptive learning biases that help to guide functionality and optimality in social learning, but this sits in contrast with the commonly held view that children are unselective “over-imitators.” Here, we tested whether 4- and 6-year-old children use social learning biases flexibly to fine-tune their copying of irrelevant actions. Children watched a video of a majority demonstrating causally irrelevant actions and a minority demonstrating only causally relevant actions. In one condition observers approved of the majority and disapproved of the minority, and in the other condition observers watched the majority and minority neutrally. Results showed that both 4- and 6-year-olds copied the inefficient majority more often than the efficient minority when the observers had approved of the majority’s actions, but they copied the efficient minority significantly more when the observers had watched neutrally. We discuss the implications of children’s optimal selectivity in copying and the importance of integrating social approval into majority-biased learning when acquiring norms and conventions and in broader processes of cultural evolution.

The Equipment of the Tyrolean Iceman: Innovation versus Adaptation in the Cultural Evolution of Prehistoric Technologies.

This study argues that the equipment of the Tyrolean Iceman offers a unique perspective for understanding the macroevolutionary-scale functional continuity between later Pleistocene and Holocene human technologies. The Iceman was discovered in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps and can be dated to around 3300 BC, corresponding to the North Italian early Copper Age. In his gear there are several technologies which are rarely found at prehistoric archaeological sites, including archery equipment, a complete set of clothing, and a personal tool kit. Our paper will discuss this technological assemblage within the framework of cultural evolutionary theories (subsequently abbreviated as CET). According to the concept of cumulative culture, tools and technologies may become the subject of cultural "descent with modification" which leads to the emergence of complex technological innovations. In conventional narratives, the Neolithic represents the single greatest macroevolutionary transition in human cultural evolution, accompanied by a whole set of novel innovations and encompassing the transition to agriculture. However, as we highlight, the Iceman's equipment includes several technologies with a pre-Neolithic cultural origin. Earlier variants of these technologies were used by cultural groups belonging to the Mesolithic and even the Upper and Middle Paleolithic. Our main goal will be to present an explanatory framework for this macroevolutionary-scale technological continuity. In order to achieve this goal, we explore the heuristic value of two basic concepts of cultural evolutionary explanations-namely, the concepts of innovation and adaptation. Building on this background, we present an overview of the data currently available on the evolutionary history of each technological adaptation found in the equipment of the Iceman. Our results suggest that these technologies were not primarily cultural innovations, but simultaneously they were "obligatory" functional adaptations with a deep evolutionary history.

A quantitative analysis of intensification in the ethnographic record.

The intensification of food production plays a central role in the evolution of complex human societies. However, it is unclear whether the standard model of intensification is theoretically or empirically justified. This leaves social scientists unable to make reasonable inferences about the relationship between intensification and the evolution of social complexity in past societies. To remedy this problem, I derive a model of intensification from human macroecology, settlement scaling theory, human behavioural ecology, cultural evolutionary theory and niche construction theory. The standard and cultural niche construction models are formalized and their predictions are tested using a comprehensive ethnographic dataset that describes food production in 40 human societies, ranging in complexity from foraging bands to agricultural states. Analysis of the ethnographic record suggests that we reject the standard model and tentatively accept the cultural niche construction model. I attempt to demonstrate the broader utility of the cultural niche construction model as a framework that may help explain the transition from small-scale to large-scale complex societies.

Social information use and social information waste.

Social information is immensely valuable. Yet we waste it. The information we get from observing other humans and from communicating with them is a cheap and reliable informational resource. It is considered the backbone of human cultural evolution. Theories and models focused on the evolution of social learning show the great adaptive benefits of evolving cognitive tools to process it. In spite of this, human adults in the experimental literature use social information quite inefficiently: they do not take it sufficiently into account. A comprehensive review of the literature on five experimental tasks documented 45 studies showing social information waste, and four studies showing social information being over-used. These studies cover 'egocentric discounting' phenomena as studied by social psychology, but also include experimental social learning studies. Social information waste means that human adults fail to give social information its optimal weight. Both proximal explanations and accounts derived from evolutionary theory leave crucial aspects of the phenomenon unaccounted for: egocentric discounting is a pervasive effect that no single unifying explanation fully captures. Cultural evolutionary theory's insistence on the power and benefits of social influence is to be balanced against this phenomenon. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.

Underappreciated features of cultural evolution.

Cultural evolution theory has long been inspired by evolutionary biology. Conceptual analogies between biological and cultural evolution have led to the adoption of a range of formal theoretical approaches from population dynamics and genetics. However, this has resulted in a research programme with a strong focus on cultural transmission. Here, we contrast biological with cultural evolution, and highlight aspects of cultural evolution that have not received sufficient attention previously. We outline possible implications for evolutionary dynamics and argue that not taking them into account will limit our understanding of cultural systems. We propose 12 key questions for future research, among which are calls to improve our understanding of the combinatorial properties of cultural innovation, and the role of development and life history in cultural dynamics. Finally, we discuss how this vibrant research field can make progress by embracing its multidisciplinary nature. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.

Pregnancy Fasting in Ramadan: Toward a Biocultural Framework

ABSTRACT Pregnancy fasting poses a paradox: why would a woman restrict her diet during a period of increased nutritional need? This qualitative, cross-sectional study applied biological and cultural evolutionary theories of pregnancy diet to emic models of fasting with the aim of establishing a testable biocultural framework of pregnancy fasting. The research took place with Muslim women residing in Mysore, India. In-depth interviews were conducted with pregnant women who have experience and knowledge of fasting during during the holy month of Ramadan. Our findings indicate that pregnancy fasting is socially acquired via multiple modes of transmission and that women do not fast according to mainstream evolutionary theories of pregnancy diet, but perhaps to gain moral capital.

The racial constitution of neoliberalism

Prevailing scholarship on neoliberalism fails to recognise that it generates its own distinctive forms of racial domination. Influential analysts such as Wolfgang Streeck, David Harvey and Wendy Brown assume or argue that racism exists today because neoliberalism’s defeat of racial legacies is incomplete. This ignores how racism is reconfigured in ways that are specific to the historical moment of neoliberalism and dependent on a distinctive and substantial intellectual and political hinterland. A consideration of Friedrich Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution reveals a contradiction in neoliberal thought between its aspiration to establish a universal market system and its dependence on particularist ideas of western cultural pre-eminence. This ideological contradiction correlates with the fact that globalisation produces masses of surplus populations which are of no market value. A racial idea of culture is the means by which neoliberalism manages and works through its own limitations. Above all, ‘race’ provides a means of coding and managing the material boundaries between different forms of labour under neoliberalism: citizen and migrant, waged and ‘unexploitable’, bearers of entitlements and bare life.

Population turnover facilitates cultural selection for efficiency in birds

Culture, defined as socially transmitted information and behaviors that are shared in groups and persist over time, is increasingly accepted to occur across a wide range of taxa and behavioral domains.1 While persistent, cultural traits are not necessarily static, and their distribution can change in frequency and type in response to selective pressures, analogous to that of genetic alleles. This has led to the treatment of culture as an evolutionary process, with cultural evolutionary theory arguing that culture exhibits the three fundamental components of Darwinian evolution: variation, competition, and inheritance.2-5 Selection for more efficient behaviors over alternatives is a crucial component of cumulative cultural evolution,6 yet our understanding of how and when such cultural selection occurs in non-human animals is limited. We performed a cultural diffusion experiment using 18 captive populations of wild-caught great tits (Parus major) to ask whether more efficient foraging traditions are selected for, and whether this process is affected by a fundamental demographic process-population turnover. Our results showed that gradual replacement of individuals with naive immigrants greatly increased the probability that a more efficient behavior invaded a population's cultural repertoire and outcompeted an established inefficient behavior. Fine-scale, automated behavioral tracking revealed that turnover did not increase innovation rates, but instead acted on adoption rates, as immigrants disproportionately sampled novel, efficient behaviors relative to available social information. These results provide strong evidence for cultural selection for efficiency in animals, and highlight the mechanism that links population turnover to this process.

Thorstein Veblen, Bard of Democracy

Few remember Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) as a connoisseur of beauty or champion of beauty’s importance to an institutionally modern and technologically sophisticated society. Similarly few credit Veblen with any constructive theory of politics. Yet Veblen’s conception of the beautiful, his account of its role in human cultural evolution, and his critique of its perversion in the industrialized societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are invaluable to contemporary social-aesthetic aims of political and economic reconstruction. In contrast to the Veblen of memory, the real Veblen devoted significant intellectual energy to building a theory of what political thinkers today call public work: creative, negotiated, open-ended production of shared goods by individuals alert both to self-interest and collective needs. Partaking of the rich tradition of philosophical pragmatism, Veblen's social aesthetics also points to that tradition's continuing value for contemporary aesthetic, social, and political theory. Indeed, further augmented by recent advances in cultural evolutionary theory, Veblen’s pragmatist, public-work aesthetics suggests a vision of democratic citizenship defined by cooperative imagination, production, critique, and re-creation of a moral and material commonwealth. The so-called “bard of savagery,” therefore, is better understood as a “bard of democracy,” narrating the travails and affirming the ideals of a culture aspiring to self-government. His is a vision that might lend the fragmented field of social aesthetics a common, compelling narrative of its own.

Transformasi Etno-Musik Tradisional Sasak: Evolusi Budaya dan Pertentangan Kelas

This article tries to explain the phenomenon of the transformation of Sasak Ethno-music, namely Gendang Beleq as a high culture , dealing with Kecimol as a pop culture in sasak community. Both types of music have developed in contemporary Sasak society with contrasting nuances. The first one represents the musical taste of the Purwangse (aristocracy) group, while the second represents the Jajar Karang group. Furthermore, Gendang Beleq claimed to be a pure culture, while Kecimol stigmatized as a splinter culture.This study uses a qualitative approach with ethnographic methods, this research tries to trace the history and development of the two types of music, namely through data sources of academic literature, direct observation and interviews with ethno-music cultural actors. To analyzing the transformation process of Gendang Beleq and Kecimol, this research uses Herbet Spencer's theory of cultural evolution and Karl Marx's theory of class conflict.Spencer's theory used to see the development of the culture of the Sasak people, especially the art of music, in the process of its evolution and transformation. Meanwhile, Marx's class theory used to analyze the class struggle between non-aristocratic versusaristocrats group behind the existential contestation of the two types of music.This research found several things: (1) the emergence of Kecimol is a natural cycle in the cultural evolution stage of a society along with social changes and the presence of modernity; (2) Kecimol is an anti-tesa from Gendang Beleq as a form of resistance from the jajarkarang group against the Purwangse Group which is caused by the cultural-economic-political (cost) problem.

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.