Models Of Cultural Evolution Research Articles

Complexity in models of cultural niche construction with selection and homophily.

Niche construction is the process by which organisms can alter the ecological environment for themselves, their descendants, and other species. As a result of niche construction, differences in selection pressures may be inherited across generations. Homophily, the tendency of like phenotypes to mate or preferentially associate, influences the evolutionary dynamics of these systems. Here we develop a model that includes selection and homophily as independent culturally transmitted traits that influence the fitness and mate choice determined by another focal cultural trait. We study the joint dynamics of a focal set of beliefs, a behavior that can differentially influence the fitness of those with certain beliefs, and a preference for partnering based on similar beliefs. Cultural transmission, selection, and homophily interact to produce complex evolutionary dynamics, including oscillations, stable polymorphisms of all cultural phenotypes, and simultaneous stability of oscillation and fixation, which have not previously been observed in models of cultural evolution or gene-culture interactions. We discuss applications of this model to the interaction of beliefs and behaviors regarding education, contraception, and animal domestication.

From cultural traditions to cumulative culture: parameterizing the differences between human and nonhuman culture

Diverse species exhibit cultural traditions, i.e. population-specific profiles of socially learned traits, from songbird dialects to primate tool-use behaviours. However, only humans appear to possess cumulative culture, in which cultural traits increase in complexity over successive generations. Theoretically, it is currently unclear what factors give rise to these phenomena, and consequently why cultural traditions are found in several species but cumulative culture in only one. Here, we address this by constructing and analysing cultural evolutionary models of both phenomena that replicate empirically attestable levels of cultural variation and complexity in chimpanzees and humans. In our model of cultural traditions (Model 1), we find that realistic cultural variation between populations can be maintained even when individuals in different populations invent the same traits and migration between populations is frequent, and under a range of levels of social learning accuracy. This lends support to claims that putative cultural traditions are indeed cultural (rather than genetic) in origin, and suggests that cultural traditions should be widespread in species capable of social learning. Our model of cumulative culture (Model 2) indicates that both the accuracy of social learning and the number of cultural demonstrators interact to determine the complexity of a trait that can be maintained in a population. Combining these models (Model 3) creates two qualitatively distinct regimes in which there are either a few, simple traits, or many, complex traits. We suggest that these regimes correspond to nonhuman and human cultures, respectively. The rarity of cumulative culture in nature may result from this interaction between social learning accuracy and number of demonstrators.

Strong group-level traits and selection-transmission thickets

I suggest that we should distinguish between weak and strong group-level traits. It is the latter that are especially problematic for developing models of cultural evolution. Using Campbell's notion of vicarious selection mechanisms, I argue that these mechanisms become intertwined with other group-level traits resulting in selection-transmission thickets that are obstacles to modeling cultural evolution.

Experimental and theoretical models of human cultural evolution.

The modern field of cultural evolution is now over 30 years old, and an extensive body of theory and data has been amassed. This article reviews models of cultural evolution, both experimental and theoretical, and surveys what they can tell us about cultural evolutionary processes. The models are grouped according to which of four broad questions they address: (1) How are cultural traits changed during transmission? (2) How and why do cultural traits accumulate over time? (3) What social learning biases do people use? and (4) What are the population-level consequences of different social learning biases? We conclude by highlighting gaps in the literature and promising future research directions, including the further integration of theoretical models and experimental data, the identification of the factors underlying cumulative cultural evolution, and the explanation of individual and cultural variation in social learning biases. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

The effect of cultural interaction on cumulative cultural evolution

Cultural transmission and cultural evolution are important for animals, especially for humans. I developed a new analytical model of cultural evolution, in which each newborn learns cultural traits from multiple individuals (exemplars) in parental generation, individually explores around learned cultural traits, judges the utility of known cultural traits, and adopts a mature cultural trait. Cultural evolutionary speed increases when individuals explore a wider range of cultural traits, accurately judge the skill level of cultural traits (strong direct bias), do not strongly conform to the population mean, increase the exploration range according to the variety of socially learned cultural traits (condition dependent exploration), and make smaller errors in social learning. Number of exemplars, population size, similarity of cultural traits between exemplars, and one-to-many transmission have little effect on cultural evolutionary speed. I also investigated how cultural interaction between two populations with different mean skill levels affects their cultural evolution. A population sometimes increases in skill level more if it encounters a less skilled population than if it does not encounter anyone. A less skilled population sometimes exceeds a more skilled population in skill level by cultural interaction between both populations. The appropriateness of this analytical method is confirmed by individual-based simulations.

Biases in cultural transmission shape the turnover of popular traits

The neutral model of cultural evolution, which assumes that copying is unbiased, provides precise predictions regarding frequency distributions of traits and the turnover within a popularity-ranked list. Here we study turnover in ranked lists and identify where the turnover departs from neutral model predictions to detect transmission biases in three different domains: color terms usage in English language 20th century books, popularity of early (1880–1930) and recent (1960–2010) USA baby names, and musical preferences of users of the Web site Last.fm. To help characterize the type of transmission bias, we modify the neutral model to include a content-based bias and two context-based biases (conformity and anti-conformity). How these modified models match real data helps us to infer, from population scale observations, when cultural transmission is biased, and, to some extent, what kind of biases are operating at individual level.

Being there: a brief visit to a neighbourhood induces the social attitudes of that neighbourhood

There are differences between human groups in social behaviours and the attitudes that underlie them, such as trust. However, the psychological mechanisms that produce and reproduce this variation are not well understood. In particular, it is not clear whether assimilation to the social culture of a group requires lengthy socialization within that group, or can be more rapidly and reversibly evoked by exposure to the group’s environment and the behaviour of its members. Here, we report the results of a two-part study in two neighbourhoods of a British city, one economically deprived with relatively high crime, and the other affluent and lower in crime. In the first part of the study, we surveyed residents and found that the residents of the deprived neighbourhood had lower levels of social trust and higher levels of paranoia than the residents of the affluent neighbourhood. In the second part, we experimentally transported student volunteers who resided in neither neighbourhood to one or the other, and had them walk around delivering questionnaires to houses. We surveyed their trust and paranoia, and found significant differences according to which neighbourhood they had been sent to. The differences in the visitors mirrored the differences seen in the residents, with visitors to the deprived neighbourhood reporting lower social trust and higher paranoia than visitors to the affluent one. The magnitudes of the neighbourhood differences in the visitors, who only spent up to 45 min in the locations, were nearly as great as the magnitudes of those amongst the residents. We discuss the relevance of our findings to differential psychology, neighbourhood effects on social outcomes, and models of cultural evolution.

Beyond Carrots and Sticks: How Cooperation and Its Rewards Evolve Together

This paper is based on the intuition of Dragonetti, an old Neapolitan economist, which argues that a society experiences economic and civic development if agents promote values and virtues, more than solely rely on punishments stated by law. We thus study the evolution of cooperative behaviors using a mechanism of endogenous social rewards for cooperation (SRC). These additional (material) rewards depend on the recognition that the society—each agent in the society—gives to cooperative strategies. We formalize it with a cultural evolution model in which the payoff matrix and the population shares coevolve. We find that this endogenous mechanism can produce a large variety of long-run situations (victory of cooperators, of non-cooperators or, finally, their coexistence) depending on the social features. Moreover, we analyze the differences between SRC and exogenous punishment, changes in cooperation costs or changes in repetition of interactions and we disentangle their respective contributions.

Cultural macroevolution in the Pacific Northwest: a phylogenetic test of the diversification and decimation model

A number of scholars have proposed models of cultural evolution whereby entities defined by socio-economic variables held at group levels evolve in a branching or cladogenetic process. The Diversification and Decimation model seeks to explain temporally short-lived patterns of cladogenetic diversification and subsequent decline in the range of such cultural variants during the Middle Holocene of North America's Pacific Northwest region. This paper uses cladistic and network techniques to examine core predictions of the model – that cultural entities evolved in a branching process, not significantly impacted by tokogenetic processes; and that the pattern of evolution was as predicted by the model. Outcomes suggest that while major tenets of the model are supported, some aspects require minor refinement. Implications are considered for future studies of this nature.

Opportunity to assimilate and pressure to discriminate can generate cultural divergence in the laboratory

Formal models of cultural evolution have illustrated circumstances under which behavioral traits that have no inherent advantage over others can undergo positive selection pressure. One situation in which this may occur is when the behavior functions as a social marker, and there is pressure to identify oneself as a member of a particular group. Our aim in the current study was to determine whether participants organized into subpopulations could effectively exploit variation in a completely novel behavior to advertise themselves as belonging to a particular subpopulation, such that discrimination between in-group and out-group members was possible and subpopulations exhibited increasing distinctiveness. Eighty participants took part, organized into four subpopulations, each composed of five four-member generations. They each completed a tower-building task, used in previous experimental studies of cultural evolution. An incentive payment structure was imposed with the aim of motivating participants to advertise themselves as belonging to a particular subpopulation and to distinguish in-group members from members of other subpopulations. The first generation were exposed to photographs of randomly assigned “seed” towers, and later generations were exposed to photographs of the towers built by the members of the previous generation of their own subpopulation. Participants were able to discriminate towers built by in-group members of the same generation, from towers built by out-group members. Over generations, tower designs evolved such that they were increasingly identifiable as belonging to a particular subpopulation. Arbitrary traits which had no prior advantage became associated with group membership, providing empirical support for theoretical models.

From individual cognition to populational culture

In my response to the commentaries from a collection of esteemed researchers, I reassess and eventually find largely intact my claim that human tool use evidences higher social and non-social cognitive ability. Nonetheless, I concede that my examination of individual-level cognitive traits does not offer a full explanation of cumulative culture yet. For that, one needs to incorporate them into population-dynamic models of cultural evolution. I briefly describe my current and future work on this.

Social learning across the life cycle: cultural knowledge acquisition for honey collection among the Jenu Kuruba, India

Accounting for age-dependent patterns of knowledge transmission is critical for understanding cultural evolution in age-structured populations. Cultural evolution theory predicts which social learning biases we expect people to use, but much less often when—during a person's life cycle— different social learning biases will be used. By measuring knowledge and skill variation among age cohorts, it is possible to infer how people socially acquire different types of knowledge at different ages. We use this strategy among the Jenu Kuruba, a tribal community in South India. We document the accumulation of local knowledge required for collecting wild honey among 71 children and 125 adults from five communities. Combining quantitative measurements of knowledge with measures of four honey-collecting skills and self-reported data on learning age, we infer patterns of social learning across the lifecycle. We find that (1) most knowledge related to honey collecting is acquired by the early 20s, and later social learning mainly functions to update information; (2) the eldest cohort has the highest average explicit knowledge, although the most knowledgeable or skilled individuals do not always belong to the most elderly cohort; (3) length of learning can be affected by age-dependent trade-offs of costs and benefits to learners; and (4) children tend to learn from parents, but individuals use other demonstrators later in life. These results have implications for current models of cultural evolution.

Cyclical Cultural Trajectories

In this study, models of cultural evolution are used to examine one of most intensively studied archaeological areas in world: the central Mesa Verde region of southern Colorado (USA). I work back and forth between models in this case study to tease out new insights into culture change in the Mesa Verde region and to suggest ways that models of culture change can be improved. The results of a new research program, the Village Ecodynamics Project, are presented here and provide the most recent and refined account of settlement in the central Mesa Verde region. The study concludes that many factors contributed to culture change in the region, and it suggests that one factor has been overlooked in previous studies: the development of incipient social hierarchy. This study argues that the development of social inequality needs to be added to the mix of factors that produced culture change, especially immigration from the region during the tenth and thirteenth centuries. This study suggests that evolutionary models emphasizing cyclical change are more appropriate than unilinear models. A model of cyclical change that highlights the dimensions of demographic scale and the emergence of hierarchical social organization best describes the cultural trajectory of the Mesa Verde region.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SPACE IN MODELS OF SOCIAL LEARNING, CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND NICHE CONSTRUCTION

This article focusses on the importance of space in mathematical models of cultural evolution, cooperation, niche construction and social learning. We discuss the benefits of including spacial effects in these evolutionary models and illustrate how the inclusion of space has changed accepted and long-standing results. We also briefly discuss the spatial dynamics of these systems and suggest future directions for research investigating spatial evolution.

基于Agent大学精神文化演化模型研究

大学是特殊群体构成的文化社会组织，其精神文化是一种“软实力”，对高校发展和构建起着重要作用，但缺乏对应的有效的量化的研究对象模型，研究其作用机理多从人文科学方面加以论述。本文应用Agent技术，用社会学仿真方法研究这一人文科学问题，分析设计了包含信仰基因的大学精神文化演化的Agent模型。模型反映了传承大学精神文化师生与放弃大学精神文化的师生相互作用，在满足社会认可的文化选择作用下进化。既体现了入校前学生个体传承的社会对大学精神文化的认可度，也体现了入学后对学生进行大学精神文化的熏陶教育作用，与先天的信仰基因因素相互作用。通过假定定量分析某些参数，推导出了一些有趣的结论，揭示了大学名师能够加速大学文化的形成和积淀条件。演化模型对理解大学的演变过程和独有文化现象有重要的理论分析价值。 University is a special group consisting of cultural and social organizations, its spiritual culture is a kind of “soft power”, is vital to the development of colleges and universities. But the lack of the correspond-ing effective quantitative research object model, more studies on its mechanism of action from the point of social scientific view is addressed. In this paper, agent social simulation method is used to study this problem. The beliefs gene is included in the spiritual and cultural Evolutionary Agent Model (EAM). The model re-flects the interaction between the teachers, students to inherit the University Spiritual Culture (USC) and those to give up the USC. Its evolution meets the social recognition of cultural selection. The EAM has con-sidered the factor of the individual student heritage community for the USC recognition before admission, and also reflects the role of the USC influence to the students during education process in the university. And these interact with the innate belief in genetic factors. After analysis with some supposed condition for EAM parameters, some interesting conclusions are archived. The simulation results show that the university fa-mous teacher is able to accelerate the formation and accumulation of the university culture. The EAM is a valid model for theoretical analysis and understanding the evolution of the USC, and some unique cultural phenomena.

THE CULTURAL TRANSMISSION OF FAITH Why innate intuitions are necessary, but insufficient, to explain religious belief

The cognitive science of religion integrates insights from diverse scientific disciplines to explain how people acquire, represent and transmit religious concepts. This perspective has led to a fruitful research program on the naturalistic origins of religion. However, it has thus far not directly addressed a key component of religion: faith or committed belief. The present review proposes a framework that integrates standard approaches from the cognitive science of religion with established models of cultural evolution and cultural learning. According to this synthetic approach, innate cognitive content biases explain how people mentally represent gods, and cultural evolutionary models explain why people come to believe and commit to the particular supernatural beliefs that they do. This synthesis offers a more complete picture of the origins and cultural persistence of religious belief.

Testing for divergent transmission histories among cultural characters: a study using Bayesian phylogenetic methods and Iranian tribal textile data.

BackgroundArchaeologists and anthropologists have long recognized that different cultural complexes may have distinct descent histories, but they have lacked analytical techniques capable of easily identifying such incongruence. Here, we show how Bayesian phylogenetic analysis can be used to identify incongruent cultural histories. We employ the approach to investigate Iranian tribal textile traditions.MethodsWe used Bayes factor comparisons in a phylogenetic framework to test two models of cultural evolution: the hierarchically integrated system hypothesis and the multiple coherent units hypothesis. In the hierarchically integrated system hypothesis, a core tradition of characters evolves through descent with modification and characters peripheral to the core are exchanged among contemporaneous populations. In the multiple coherent units hypothesis, a core tradition does not exist. Rather, there are several cultural units consisting of sets of characters that have different histories of descent.ResultsFor the Iranian textiles, the Bayesian phylogenetic analyses supported the multiple coherent units hypothesis over the hierarchically integrated system hypothesis. Our analyses suggest that pile-weave designs represent a distinct cultural unit that has a different phylogenetic history compared to other textile characters.ConclusionsThe results from the Iranian textiles are consistent with the available ethnographic evidence, which suggests that the commercial rug market has influenced pile-rug designs but not the techniques or designs incorporated in the other textiles produced by the tribes. We anticipate that Bayesian phylogenetic tests for inferring cultural units will be of great value for researchers interested in studying the evolution of cultural traits including language, behavior, and material culture.

Fatal Attraction? Why Sperber’s Attractors do not Prevent Cumulative Cultural Evolution

In order to explain why cultural traits remain stable despite the error-proneness of social learning, Dan Sperber has proposed that human psychology and ecology lead to cultural traits being transformed in the direction of attractors. This means that simple-minded Darwinian models of cultural evolution are not appropriate. Some scientists and philosophers have been concerned that Sperber’s notion of attractors might show more than this, that attractors destroy subtle cultural variation and prevent adaptive cultural evolutionary processes from occurring. I show that Sperber’s view does not have this consequence—that even if there are attractors, cumulative cultural evolution can still occur. 1 Introduction2 Why Attractors are Supposed to Pose a Problem for Cumulative Cultural Evolution3 Why Attractors do not Prevent Cumulative Cultural Evolution 3.1 Reconstruction probably retains adaptively important features of cultural traits 3.2 Cultural selection may counteract the effects of attractors when cultural variation is adaptively important 3.3 Attractors may be numerous 3.4 Factors of attraction may often be working on the components of cultural traits 3.5 Attractors are highly variable, even within local populations4 Conclusion

Modelling the evolution and diversity of cumulative culture

Previous work on mathematical models of cultural evolution has mainly focused on the diffusion of simple cultural elements. However, a characteristic feature of human cultural evolution is the seemingly limitless appearance of new and increasingly complex cultural elements. Here, we develop a general modelling framework to study such cumulative processes, in which we assume that the appearance and disappearance of cultural elements are stochastic events that depend on the current state of culture. Five scenarios are explored: evolution of independent cultural elements, stepwise modification of elements, differentiation or combination of elements and systems of cultural elements. As one application of our framework, we study the evolution of cultural diversity (in time as well as between groups).

Stability of Groups with Costly Beliefs and Practices

Costly signaling theory has been employed to explain the persistence of costly displays in a wide array of species, including humans. Henrich (2009) builds on earlier signaling models to develop a cultural evolutionary model of costly displays. Significantly, Henrich's model shows that there can be a stable equilibrium for an entire population committed to costly displays, persisting alongside a no-cost stable equilibrium for the entire population. Here we generalize Henrich's result to the more realistic situation of a population peppered with subgroups committed to high-cost beliefs and practices. The investigative tool is an agent-based model in which agents have cognitive capacities similar to those presupposed in Henrich's population-level cultural evolutionary model, and agents perform similar fitness calculations. Unlike in Henrich's model, which has no group differentiation within the population, our model agents use fitness calculations to determine whether to join or leave high-cost groups. According to our model, high-cost groups achieve long-term stability within a larger population under a wide range of circumstances, a finding that extends Henrich's result in a more realistic direction. The most important emergent pathway to costly group stability is the simultaneous presence of high charisma and consistency of the group leader and high cost of the group. These findings have strategic implications both for leading groups committed to costly beliefs and practices and for controlling their size and influence within wider cultural settings.