Modes Of Cultural Transmission Research Articles

The Transmission of Genes and Culture: A Questionable Analogy

Modes of cultural transmission are, by analogy with modes of genetic transmission, ways in which cultural information is transmitted between individuals. Despite its importance across the behavioral sciences and for theories of cultural evolution, no attempts have been made, to our knowledge, to critically analyze this analogy. We here aim at such detailed comparison and show that the fundamental role of modes of transmission in biology results mainly from two properties of genetic transmission: (1) what is transmitted generally does not influence the way in which it is transmitted; (2) there is a limited number of simple and stable modes. In culture however, modes of transmission generally lack these two fundamental properties. In particular, in culture it is often the rate of evolutionary change that determines the mode of transmission. We offer some tentative explanation regarding the origins of such a fundamental difference and we conclude that cultural transmission modes are not causal mechanisms that govern the transmission of culture but mere descriptions of the way culture happens to be transmitted at a given time in a given community. This shows the limit of the analogy between biological and cultural evolution and suggests that evolutionary models and theories differ substantially between the two domains.

What’s Culture Got to Do With It?

The author examines the role of culture in education in historical perspective to suggest the conditions required to promote generalized educational reform. Although deliberate instruction appears to be a ubiquitous characteristic of human beings, schools arise only when large numbers of people begin to live in close proximity, using technologies that create economic surpluses. Schooling is associated with the development of institutionalized hierarchies, modes of cultural transmission associated with writing and record keeping, and increased political-economic disparities within societies. The author examines several strategies for seeking change in the cultural foundations of schooling. He offers suggestions for why such strategies appear to have limited impact, and he discusses changes in global conditions that might lead to generalized educational reform.

The Cultural Transmission of Great Basin Projectile-Point Technology II: An Agent-Based Computer Simulation

We present an agent-based computer simulation that extends a previous experimental simulation (Mesoudi and O"Brien 2008) of the cultural transmission of projectile-point technology in the prehistoric Great Basin, with participants replaced with computer-generated agents. As in the experiment, individual learning is found to generate low correlations between artifact attributes, whereas indirectly biased cultural transmission (copying the point design of the most successful hunter) generates high correlations between artifact attributes. These results support the hypothesis that low attribute correlations in prehistoric California resulted from individual learning, and high attribute correlations in prehistoric Nevada resulted from indirectly biased cultural transmission. However, alternative modes of cultural transmission, including conformist transmission and random copying, generated similarly high attribute correlations as indirect bias, suggesting that it may be difficult to infer which transmission rule generated this archaeological pattern. On the other hand, indirect bias out-performed all other cultural-transmission rules, lending plausibility to the original hypothesis. Importantly, this advantage depends on the assumption of a multimodal adaptive landscape in which there are multiple locally optimal artifact designs. Indeed, in unimodal fitness environments no cultural transmission rule outperformed individual learning, highlighting how the shape of the adaptive landscape within which cultural evolution occurs can strongly influence the dynamics of cultural transmission. Generally, experimental and computer simulations can be useful in answering questions that are difficult to address with archaeological data, such as identifying the consequences of different modes of cultural transmission or exploring the effect of different selective environments.

Iterated learning: Intergenerational knowledge transmission reveals inductive biases

Cultural transmission of information plays a central role in shaping human knowledge. Some of the most complex knowledge that people acquire, such as languages or cultural norms, can only be learned from other people, who themselves learned from previous generations. The prevalence of this process of "iterated learning" as a mode of cultural transmission raises the question of how it affects the information being transmitted. Analyses of iterated learning utilizing the assumption that the learners are Bayesian agents predict that this process should converge to an equilibrium that reflects the inductive biases of the learners. An experiment in iterated function learning with human participants confirmed this prediction, providing insight into the consequences of intergenerational knowledge transmission and a method for discovering the inductive biases that guide human inferences.

Gene-Culture Coevolutionary Games

Gene-culture interactions have largely been modelled employing population genetic-type models. Moreover, in the most notable application to date, the modes have been one way rather than bidirectional. This paper suggests using game theoretic, fully interactive models. Employing the logic utilized in population ecology for coevolution between two species, the basic kinds of coevolutionary interactions possible between biological and sociocultural strategies are mutualism, in which both are favored to match; competition, in which they are favored to unmatch; and antagonism, in which one is favored to match and the other to unmatch, in two possible ways. Hypothetical examples based on life history characteristics, ones emphasizing the importance of the mode of cultural transmission, and possible complications are discussed.

Towards an Ethics of Remembering: The Walser-Bubis Debate and the Other of Discourse

Engaging with current theories of cultural memory, this article combines a largely phenomenological with a psychoanalytic perspective in order to address those alternative modes of cultural transmission that communicate through the unsaid, the sous-entendu and silence. Questioning the sufficiency of narratalogical models of cultural memory, the article focuses on memory as a rupture of presence with a view to outlining an ethically driven theory of cultural memory. In light of the recent proliferation of various forms of Holocaust commemoration, the article highlights some of the dangers associated with an overly didacticized approach to remembering. It proposes that cultural memory must be reconfigured in terms of an ethics of remembering which is based on the indexicality of historical experience. These insights are then applied to the Walser-Bubis debate, arguing that, entangled in a false opposition between shame and pride, Walser ultimately failed to recognize both the indexicality of the past and the alterity of the other.

The Negotiation of Teachers' Sociocultural Identities and Practices in Postsecondary EFL Classrooms

This article explores the complex interrelationships between language and culture, between teachers' sociocultural identities and teaching practices, and between their explicit discussions of culture and implicit modes of cultural transmission in their classes. A 6-month ethnographic study examined how teachers deal with institutional and curricular expectations regarding their teaching of (North American) culture in their EFL classrooms in a postsecondary institution in Japan. The study also explored the teachers' changing understandings of what constitutes culture and of how they viewed themselves in terms of their various social and cultural roles. Common themes included (a) the complexities and paradoxes associated with teachers' professional, social, political, and cultural identities and their (re)presentation of these in class; (b) their quest for interpersonal and intercultural connection in that EFL context; (c) their desire for educational (and personal) control in the face of contested cultural practices; and (d) disjunctures between teachers' implicit and explicit messages in relation to their cultural understandings and practices. We discuss these themes and make recommendations for teacher education purposes. We argue that the cultural underpinnings of language curricula and teaching must be examined further, particularly so in intercultural situations in which participants are negotiating their sociocultural identities as well as the curriculum.

The role of memory in the transmission of culture

Abstract Following earlier discussions of the roles played by memory in oral and literate societies, this paper distinguishes between inscribed and incorporated practices in the process of cultural transmission. Instead of adopting the distinction between literate and non‐literate societies, it shows how different modes of cultural transmission can be associated with different kinds of political strategy and with different forms of religious life.

The evolution of the “Con Artist”

A series of game-theoretical models for the evolution of, what in the folk literature has become known as, the “Confidence Artist” is presented. Con artists are assumed to be noncooperators who move between groups and “prey” on naive cooperators. Cooperators learn about con artists by either direct experience or via cultural transmission about the identity (or behavior) of such individuals. Three types of transmission rules about con artists are modeled: 1) transmission rate that is independent of the frequency of con artists in the metapopulation; 2) transmission such that cooperators, with some probability, can learn about particular con artists who have entered their group; and 3) a type of frequency dependent transmission such that cooperators can identify con artists in proportion to their frequency in the metapopulation. In general, cultural transmission works against con artists by 1) decreasing the critical between travel patch travel time to invade a metapopulation of cooperators or 2) decreasing the equilibrial frequency of con artists (compared to the case of no cultural transmission). Depending on the mode of cultural transmission, con artists may exist at relatively high or low frequencies.

Ritual and cultural reproduction in non‐Islamic Java

Recent studies link the problem of cultural transmission to the larger issue of how we conceptualize cultural history and integration. I address this question here by examining reproduction and change in lava's only surviving Indic priesthood. The conflict of meanings characteristic of priestly and popular ritual culture in modern Tengger has a history shaped by the differing modes of cultural transmission around which this non‐Islamic tradition was organized. I also raise some questions as to the relation of social order to cultural form and of public symbolism to private thought, [cultural transmission, religious change, Indonesia, Islam and Hinduism, myth and ritual]

Models for cultural inheritance: a general linear model

A theory of cultural evolution is proposed based on a general linear mode of cultural transmission. The trait of an individual is assumed to depend on the values of the same trait in other individuals of the same, the previous or earlier generation. The transmission matrix W has as its elements the proportional contributions of each individual (i) of one generation to each individual (j) of another. In addition, there is random variation (copy error or innovation) for each individual. Means and variances of a group of N individuals change with time and will stabilize asymptotically if the matrix W is irreducible and aperiodic. The rate of convergence is geometric and is governed by the largest non-unit eigenvalue of W. Groups fragment and evolve independently if W is reducible. The means of independent groups vary at random at a predicted rate, a phenomenon termed "random cultural drift". Variances within a group tend to be small, assuming cultural homogeneity. Transmission matrices of the teacher/leader type, and of parental type have been specifically considered, as well as social hierarchies. Various limitations, extensions, and some chances of application are discussed.