Cultural Evolutionary Processes Research Articles

A Co-evolved Continuum of Language, Culture and Cognition: Prospects of In-terdisciplinary Research

This paper deals with questions of language evolution and discusses the emergence of linguistic communication systems in the framework of a co-evolving continuum of language, culture and cognition. Different approaches have tried to unravel the mechanisms underlying language evolution and put emphasis on different aspects, for instance, biological vs. cultural mechanisms. While both are important, I will argue that at least a strong nativism should be refuted. After comparing both approaches, evidence from various lines of research (but especially agent-based models) will be reviewed to argue for the existence of cultural evolutionary processes. In these experiments linguistic structure emerges from scratch via self-organization and selection merely due to interaction and cultural transmission. At the same time, the diversity we can observe in growing cross-linguistic data suggests that many grammatical and conceptual categories that had been considered ‘universal’ do in fact vary. These findings, especially in the semantic domain of space have led to claims about the relation of language and general cognition and a revival of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, but it remains unclear in which directions language, culture and cognition interact. Here I argue that these problems can be approached in the presented framework from an evolutionary perspective. I propose how to address them empirically by combining agent-based models, experimental semiotics and insights from comparative linguistics. I further aim to stress the importance of the ecological environment in evolutionary models and give ex-amples of how it can be taken into account in future empirical work. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.25.8504

The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10-12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate.

The origin of the Gravettian

The Gravettian is an Upper Palaeolithic unit that had a pan-European range. Unlike the Aurignacian, it did not extend beyond Europe. In terms of taxonomy, in a polythetic system, the Gravettian can be placed on various levels. In terms of material culture and lithic inventories, it is closer to the concept of a “technocomplex”, while in terms of symbolic culture it corresponds to the concept of “archaeological culture”. These differences in the degree of the correlation of particular socio-cultural sub-systems have caused emphasis to be placed either on unifying elements, or on differentiating components.These different viewpoints on the Gravettian have resulted in various hypotheses of the origins of this complex. These hypotheses take into account:a) monocentric origin from Danubian centers, from which the Gravettian spread to the west giving rise to the “western European Perigordian”, and to eastern Europe where it gave rise to the Kostienkian (the Kostienki–Avdeyevo culture). This hypothesis is most frequently proposed.b) polycentric origins that assume other centers of autonomous formation of the Gravettian (e.g. eastern European and middle Mediterranean centres).c) origins related to cultural adaptations that led to convergent cultural evolution in various territories in consequence of environmental changes, notably in the younger part of MIS 3.None of these hypotheses seems to fully explain the processes of the emergence of the Gravettian. It is only a combination of these hypotheses that enables a more penetrating understanding of the process of cultural evolution in the Middle Upper Palaeolithic in Europe.Doubtless, the Gravettian is a varied unit in a number of aspects. Nevertheless, similarities do exist in respect of numerous elements of technology, morphology of lithic and bone implements, symbolic culture, behaviours related to food procurement, and the broad sphere of inter-group contacts and zones of raw material procurement. In the Gravettian, a number of elements are herbingers of the “Neolithic revolution”: the semi-settled way of life (multiseasonal settlements), intentionally designed lay-out of villages, the use of fired clay, the building of complex dwelling structures, and the use of plant foods.

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.

Cultural Evolution and Ideology in Korean Soccer: Sport and Nationalism

Modern Korean sports have been adopted mostly from the West, but now Korea has emerged as a sporting power demanding global attention. The influence of historical and political ideology has been in the cultural background of Korean sports development, and the process of cultural evolution in soccer may be explained in the similar context. What helped the Korean soccer team qualify for the World Cup eight consecutive times – only the sixth country in the world to do so – thus making it the most powerful soccer team in Asia? Soccer initially appeared in Korea during the threat of Japanese invasion, and this backdrop provided the opportunity for soccer to be combined with nationalism and transformed into a cultural product that confronted Japanese imperialism. Since the Korean War, South Korean soccer has become a vehicle for ideological confrontation with North Korea amid the atmosphere of the Cold War, and it thus gave rise to sports nationalism by revealing an ideological superiority and nationalistic disposition. Soccer, which arrived in Korea on a British ship, has become a representative Korean sport and continuously challenges the global stage ahead of Asia's leading economic power. It was against the background of such rapid development that nationalism formed.

Does religion make people moral?

I address three common empirical questions about the connection between religion and morality: (1) Do religious beliefs and practices shape moral behavior? (2) Do all religions universally concern themselves with moral behavior? (3) Is religion necessary for morality? I draw on recent empirical research on religious prosociality to reach several conclusions. First, awareness of supernatural monitoring and other mechanisms found in religions encourage prosociality towards strangers, and in that regard, religions have come to influence moral behavior. Second, religion’s connection with morality is culturally variable; this link is weak or absent in small-scale groups, and solidifies as group size and societal complexity increase over time and across societies. Third, moral sentiments that encourage prosociality evolved independently of religion, and secular institutions can serve social monitoring functions; therefore religion is not necessary for morality. Supernatural monitoring and related cultural practices build social solidarity and extend moral concern to strangers as a result of a cultural evolutionary process.

Towards a theory of cultural transmission in minorities

We outline a theory of cultural transmission in socio-cultural minorities in a foreign cultural environment. The explanatory focus of the theory is on the educational activities of minorities and on the educational policies of the majority towards them. The theory comprises two components referring to, respectively, the proximate psychological mechanisms and the distal cultural–evolutionary processes that underlie minority– majority interactions. The first theory component is an action–theoretical model of the interaction between majorities and minorities in the educational domain. A central assumption of this model is that socio-cultural groups have a culture-transmission motive, i.e. a desire to maintain and transmit their culture. The second component of the theory consists of a set of assumptions about the evolution of socio-cultural groups that provides an enhanced understanding of the basic goals and strategies of minorities and majorities in cultural-transmission situations. It is argued that the theory allows an explanation of several findings that pose difficulties to existing theories, in particular, the frequently observed stability of cultural traits in ethnic minorities.

Sociality, trust, kinship and cultural evolution

Pre-history human economic development, it will be argued, was the result of significant increases in sociality, that itself was a product of the evolution of a human temperament associated with much more interpersonal tolerance and trust which facilitated kinship recognition and significantly expanded social network size. All this made possible in humans, an ongoing cultural evolutionary processes not seen in other animals. Though our close cousins the chimpanzees and some other animals display forms of culture, there is little evidence of significant ongoing cultural evolution in nonhuman animals. The expansion of human social networks increased the rate of cultural evolution, in part, by increasing the fixation rate of new components of culture.

Cultural phylogeography of the Bantu Languages of sub-Saharan Africa

There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking Bantu languages as they expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of Bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order to assess the likely pathway of expansion and test between dispersal scenarios. The results clearly support a scenario in which groups first moved south through the rainforest from a homeland somewhere near the Nigeria-Cameroon border. Emerging on the south side of the rainforest, one branch moved south and west. Another branch moved towards the Great Lakes, eventually giving rise to the monophyletic clade of East Bantu languages that inhabit East and Southeastern Africa. These phylogenies also reveal information about more general processes involved in the diversification of human populations into distinct ethnolinguistic groups. Our study reveals that Bantu languages show a latitudinal gradient in covering greater areas with increasing distance from the equator. Analyses suggest that this pattern reflects a true ecological relationship rather than merely being an artefact of shared history. The study shows how a phylogeographic approach can address questions relating to the specific histories of certain groups, as well as general cultural evolutionary processes.

Animal signals and emotion in music: coordinating affect across groups.

Researchers studying the emotional impact of music have not traditionally been concerned with the principled relationship between form and function in evolved animal signals. The acoustic structure of musical forms is related in important ways to emotion perception, and thus research on non-human animal vocalizations is relevant for understanding emotion in music. Musical behavior occurs in cultural contexts that include many other coordinated activities which mark group identity, and can allow people to communicate within and between social alliances. The emotional impact of music might be best understood as a proximate mechanism serving an ultimately social function. Recent work reveals intimate connections between properties of certain animal signals and evocative aspects of human music, including (1) examinations of the role of nonlinearities (e.g., broadband noise) in non-human animal vocalizations, and the analogous production and perception of these features in human music, and (2) an analysis of group musical performances and possible relationships to non-human animal chorusing and emotional contagion effects. Communicative features in music are likely due primarily to evolutionary by-products of phylogenetically older, but still intact communication systems. But in some cases, such as the coordinated rhythmic sounds produced by groups of musicians, our appreciation and emotional engagement might be driven by an adaptive social signaling system. Future empirical work should examine human musical behavior through the comparative lens of behavioral ecology and an adaptationist cognitive science. By this view, particular coordinated sound combinations generated by musicians exploit evolved perceptual response biases – many shared across species – and proliferate through cultural evolutionary processes.

A social intelligent system for multi-objective optimization of classification rules using cultural algorithms

Cultural algorithms (CA) use social intelligence to solve problems in optimization. The CA is a class of evolutionary computational models inspired from observing the cultural evolutionary process in nature. Cultural algorithms employ a basic set of knowledge sources, each related to knowledge observed in various animal species. Knowledge from these sources is then combined to influence the decisions of the individual agents in solving problems. Classification using "IF-THEN" rules comes under descriptive knowledge discovery in data mining and is the most sought out by users since they represent highly comprehensible form of knowledge. The rules have certain properties which make them useful forms of actionable knowledge to the users. The rules are evaluated using these properties represented as objective and subjective measures. The rule properties may be conflicting. Hence discovery of rules with specific properties is considered as a multi-objective optimization problem. In the current study an extended cultural algorithm which applies social intelligence in the data mining domain to present users with a set of rules optimized according to user specified metrics is proposed. Preliminary experimental results using benchmark data sets reveal that the algorithm is promising in producing rules with specific properties.

Communicative Modelling of Cultural Transmission and Evolution Through a Holographic Cognition Model

This article presents communicative ways to model the transmission and evolution of the processes and artefacts of a culture as the result of ongoing interactions between its members - both at the tacit and the explicit level. The purpose is not to model the entire cultural process, but to provide semantically rich “conceptual placeholders” for modelling any cultural activity that is considered important enough within a certain context. The general purpose of communicative modelling is to create models that improve the quality of communication between people. In order to capture the subjective aspects of Gregory Bateson’s definition of information as “a difference that makes a difference,” the article introduces a Holographic Cognition Model that uses optical holography as an analogy for human cognition, with the object beam of holography corresponding to the first difference (the situation that the cognitive agent encounters), and the reference beam of holography corresponding to the subjective experiences and biases that the agent brings to the situation, and which makes the second difference (the interference/interpretation pattern) unique for each agent. By combining the HCM with a semantically rich and recursive form of process modelling, based on the SECI-theory of knowledge creation, we arrive at way to model the cultural transmission and evolution process that is consistent with the Unified Theory of Information (the Triple-C model) with its emphasis on intra-, inter- and supra-actions.

Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?

Cumulative culture denotes the, arguably, human capacity to build on the cultural behaviors of one's predecessors, allowing increases in cultural complexity to occur such that many of our cultural artifacts, products and technologies have progressed beyond what a single individual could invent alone. This process of cumulative cultural evolution underlies human cultural success and has enabled us to reach and inhabit some of the most inhospitable environments on this planet. Why humans, but not other animals, have exhibited a cultural explosion has caused much deliberation. The human propensity to imitate, teach, “mind-read” and cooperate have all featured prominently in accounts of the prerequisites for cumulative culture. However, this may not represent the complete picture. In this article we consider whether there exists a link between future thinking, specifically prospective mental time travel, and the observed distribution of cumulative culture.

The co-evolution of language and emotions

We argue that language evolution started like the evolution of reading and writing, through cultural evolutionary processes. Genuinely new behavioural patterns emerged from collective exploratory processes that individuals could learn because of their brain plasticity. Those cultural-linguistic innovative practices that were consistently socially and culturally selected drove a process of genetic accommodation of both general and language-specific aspects of cognition. We focus on the affective facet of this culture-driven cognitive evolution, and argue that the evolution of human emotions co-evolved with that of language. We suggest that complex tool manufacture and alloparenting played an important role in the evolution of emotions, by leading to increased executive control and inter-subjective sensitivity. This process, which can be interpreted as a special case of self-domestication, culminated in the construction of human-specific social emotions, which facilitated information-sharing. Once in place, language enhanced the inhibitory control of emotions, enabled the development of novel emotions and emotional capacities, and led to a human mentality that departs in fundamental ways from that of other apes. We end by suggesting experimental approaches that can help in evaluating some of these proposals and hence lead to better understanding of the evolutionary biology of language and emotions.

Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems

Human social life is uniquely complex and diverse. Much of that complexity and diversity arises from culturally transmitted ideas, values and skills that underpin the operation of social norms and institutions that structure our social life. Considerable theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to the role of cultural evolutionary processes in the evolution of social norms and institutions. The most persistent controversy has been over the role of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution in early human populations during Pleistocene. We argue that cultural group selection and related cultural evolutionary processes had an important role in shaping the innate components of our social psychology. By the Upper Paleolithic humans seem to have lived in societies structured by institutions, as do modern populations living in small-scale societies. The most ambitious attempts to test these ideas have been the use of experimental games in field settings to document human similarities and differences on theoretically interesting dimensions. These studies have documented a huge range of behavior across populations, although no societies so far examined follow the expectations of selfish rationality. These data are at least consistent with operation of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution operating in the deep tribal past and with the contemporary importance of cultural evolution in the evolution of institutions and institutional diversity.

Nothing in medicine makes sense, except in the light of evolution

The practice of medicine is a fruitful marriage of classic diagnostic and healing arts with modern advancements in many relevant sciences. The scientific aspects of medicine are rooted in understanding the biology of our species and those of other organisms that interact with us in health and disease. Thus, it is reasonable to paraphrase Dobzhansky, stating that, "nothing in the biological aspects of medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution." However, the art and science of medicine are also rooted in the unusual cognitive abilities of humans and the cultural evolutionary processes arising. This explains the rather bold and inclusive title of this essay. The near complete absence of evolution in medical school curricula is a historical anomaly that needs correction. Otherwise, we will continue to train generations of physicians who lack understanding of some fundamental principles that should guide both medical practice and research. I here recount my attempts to correct this deficiency at my own medical school and the lessons learned. I also attempt to summarize what I teach in the limited amount of time allowed for the purpose. Particular attention is given to the value of comparing human physiology and disease with those of other closely related species. There is a long way to go before the teaching of evolution can be placed in its rightful context within the medical curriculum. However, the trend is in the right direction. Let us aim for a day when an essay like this will no longer be relevant.

On Cultural Selection: Examining the Process of Cultural Evolution through Funerary Evidence

On Cultural Selection: Examining the Process of Cultural Evolution through Funerary Evidence

EDITORIAL — CULTURAL EVOLUTION IN SPATIALLY STRUCTURED POPULATIONS: A REVIEW OF ALTERNATIVE MODELING FRAMEWORKS

We consider the dynamics of cultural evolution in spatially-structured populations. Most spatially explicit modeling approaches can be broadly divided into two classes: micro- and macro-level models. Macro-level models study cultural evolution at the population level and describe the average behavior of the considered system. Conversely, micro-level models focus on the constituent units of the system, and study the evolutionary dynamics that emerge out of the interaction between these units. In this paper, we give an overview of the general properties of micro- and macro-level models using the examples of agent-based simulations and of continuum models based in diffusion theory; we highlight how both frameworks account for spatially-dependent processes. We argue that both micro- and macro-level models are well-suited to describe the process of cultural evolution in spatial settings and stress that micro- and macro-level models should not be considered as competing alternatives, but rather as complementary tools that can provide different insights into cultural evolutionary dynamics. Although adding spatial components to any model increases its complexity, we argue (based on the findings presented by contributors to this Special Issue of Advances in Complex Systems), that the incorporation of space into the evolutionary framework is a necessary step towards a more complete understanding of the process of cultural evolution.

Language origin from simulation of language evolution: Comment on “Modeling the cultural evolution of language” by Luc Steels

The study on language evolution clarifies the process and mechanism of emergence and cultural evolution of human language. By simulating Language Games Steels [3] demonstrates that not only general features of human language such as sharing vocabularies in a population but also characteristics studied in linguistics such as case systems and agreement can emerge through cultural evolution. In the field of the evolution of language, the language origin has also been explored. It helps understanding the biological evolutionary processes of cognitive and physical mechanisms necessary for evolution of human language. Steels [3] emphasizes that general cognitive abilities are sufficient for the emergence of basic features of human language through cultural evolution. Although such findings are critically important, we cannot say that the problem of language origin is solved. The general human cognitive abilities are not the same as those of non-human animals, while there may be continuity. For example, Tomasello [4] says that joint attention including three-term relationships is necessary for human communication, but chimpanzees can understand only two-term relationships. The success of communication requires mutual understanding of intention to communicate [4], which is suggested to be fundamental for formation of human communication system [1]. Sharing vocabulary as linguistic knowledge, which is described by Naming Game simulations, is necessary but insufficient. How can we progress in the study of language origin with modeling and simulation? Simulation studies of language evolution have clarified required cognitive mechanisms for the emergence and cultural evolution of linguistic features. Steels indicates three essential functions to achieve shared vocabulary: invention, adoption, and alignment. An iterated learning model [2] demonstrates that generalization learning is insufficient and some cognitive biases are essential for unidirectional meaning change observed in grammaticalization, a characteristic language change phenomenon. Simulations demonstrate that more specific mechanisms are required for specific linguistic characters including case systems and alignment [3]. Cognitive mechanisms of joint attention have also been studied. These cognitive mechanisms and biases are the candidates of dispositions peculiar to human linguistic communication. The modeling studies including not only computer simulation but also mathematical, robotic, and experimental approaches have illustrated the conditions, dispositions, and mechanisms required for the emergence of characteristics peculiar to human language. These findings advance the exploration of language origins through simulations in more

Quantification of developmental birdsong learning from the subsyllabic scale to cultural evolution

Quantitative analysis of behavior plays an important role in birdsong neuroethology, serving as a common denominator in studies spanning molecular to system-level investigation of sensory-motor conversion, developmental learning, and pattern generation in the brain. In this review, we describe the role of behavioral analysis in facilitating cross-level integration. Modern sound analysis approaches allow investigation of developmental song learning across multiple time scales. Combined with novel methods that allow experimental control of vocal changes, it is now possible to test hypotheses about mechanisms of vocal learning. Further, song analysis can be done at the population level across generations to track cultural evolution and multigenerational behavioral processes. Complementing the investigation of song development with noninvasive brain imaging technology makes it now possible to study behavioral dynamics at multiple levels side by side with developmental changes in brain connectivity and in auditory responses.