Cultural Evolutionary Processes Research Articles

Our fragile future under the cumulative cultural evolution of two technologies

We derive and analyse a model with unusual features characterizing human activities over the long-run. First, human population dynamics draw heavily on consumer–resource modelling in ecology in that humans must consume biological resources to produce new humans. Second, the model also draws heavily from economic growth theory in that humans do not simply consume biological resources; they also produce the resources they consume. Finally, humans use two types of technology. Consumption technology affects the rate at which humans can extract resources. Production technology controls how effectively humans convert labour into new resources. The dynamics of both types of technology are subject to cumulative cultural evolutionary processes that allow both technological progress and regress. The resulting model exhibits a wide range of dynamical regimes. That said, the system is routinely sensitive to initial conditions, with wildly different outcomes given the same parameter values. Moreover, the system exhibits a basic fragility in the sense that human activities often lead to the endogenous extinction of the human species. This can happen gently, or it can follow periods of explosive human activity with super-exponential growth that ends in collapse. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis’.

Reliable detection and quantification of selective forces in language change

AbstractLanguage change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to corpus data to quantify the strength of selection in specific instances of historical language change. We first demonstrate, in the context of English irregular verbs, that this method is more reliable and interpretable than similar methods that have previously been applied. We further extend this study to demonstrate that a bias towards phonological simplicity overrides that favouring grammatical simplicity when these are in conflict. Finally, with reference to Spanish spelling reforms, we show that the method can also detect points in time at which selection strengths change, a feature that is generically expected for socially-motivated language change. Together, these results indicate how hypotheses for mechanisms of language change can be tested quantitatively using historical corpus data.

Material Characterization of Mayapán’s Effigy Censers’ Sherds

Ceramic production from ancient Mesoamerican civilizations is related with cultural and technological evolution processes. Studying ritual objects also provides information on ancient traditions and allows researchers to determine the importance of certain materials employed in its manufacture. In this work, a set of 72 of Mayapán’s effigy censers’ sherds was analyzed in situ by using a combination of non-invasive, non-destructive spectroscopic and imaging techniques for material characterization; colorimetry established an initial classification of the pigments present in the objects, XRF provided elemental information, FORS allowed us to describe the molecular characteristics, and hyperspectral imaging established compositional contrasts or similitudes between large regions of the different objects. Pigments were characterized, allowing us to describe the materials used in the decorations of such ritual objects. The pottery matrix was also characterized, leading to a detailed description of the clays and mixtures of minerals employed in the construction of the effigy censers.

A polycentric network strategy for regional diversification of agriculture: theory and implementation

Widespread and substantial diversification of current agroecosystems appears fundamental to meeting many grand challenges in agriculture. Despite urgent calls for diversification on regional scales, particularly in regions dominated by industrialized, low-diversity agriculture, strategies for diversification on such scales are in early stages of development, conceptually and practically. We outline such a strategy, and its implementation by the Forever Green Partnership, a public-private-NGO coalition in support of agricultural diversification in the U.S. Midwest region. Our strategy supports introduction and scaling of multiple novel crops in a region, which requires development of many interdependent supporting elements, including supportive markets, infrastructure, policy, finance, and R&D. The core of our strategy is development of sustainable supply chains (SSCs) for a set of novel crops. We define SSCs as rudimentary systems of these supporting elements for novel crops, linking on-farm crop production to end-use markets while advancing economic, environmental, and social sustainability criteria that are demanded by stakeholders. SSCs provide a scaffold upon which fully-developed support systems for multiple novel crops can be constructed, thus driving regional diversification. SSCs cannot be “built in a day”; rather they must evolve as production of novel crops expands over time and space, and as new challenges and opportunities emerge. Therefore, regional diversification requires a system to sustain this evolutionary process across time and multiple novel crops. We posit that an effective system can be built from two crucial elements: a process of conscious and concerted cultural evolution, and a polycentric network that organizes and supports that process. We outline this system and its conceptual basis, and its implementation by the Forever Green Partnership, and associated challenges and accomplishments. Three years after its inception, the Partnership has attracted substantial resources, developed a polycentric network, and some elements of the cultural-evolution process are in place. However, node development is uneven across the network, hindering its operation. In addition to advancing strategies for regional-scale diversification, the Partnership is seeking to advance conceptual and practical understanding of sustainability transitions in agriculture, and to explore the potential value of conscious cultural evolution in such transitions.

Marital preferences and stable matching in cultural evolution

Building on previous literature that examines the influence of intergenerational transmission in cultural evolution, we highlight the importance of the marriage market in the determination of cultural homogeneity (“melting pot”) versus heterogeneity (“diversity”). To do so, we characterize cultural evolutionary processes under different distributions of marital preferences and stable matching schemes. In our setting, cultural substitutability (Bisin and Verdier, 2001) is neither sufficient nor necessary for cultural heterogeneity. We introduce a new concept, elasticity of cultural substitution, to capture the degree of increase in vertical socialization efforts in response to minority population decline. With perfect or inelastic vertical transmission in homogamous families, cultural heterogeneity is sustained only if all proposers are homophilic or all members of a cultural group are homophilic. With imperfect vertical transmission in homogamous families, the presence of heterophilic agents may destabilize cultural heterogeneity, and the proportion of heterophilic agents and elasticity of cultural substitution determine whether cultural heterogeneity can be sustained. We discuss the model's implications for the long-lasting impact of temporary gender imbalance on cultural evolution as well as the cultural assimilation and preservation of minorities and immigrants under distinct governmental and religious attitudes toward intermarriage.

What Makes Us Smart?

How did humans become clever enough to live in nearly every major ecosystem on earth, create vaccines against deadly plagues, explore the oceans depths, and routinely traverse the globe at 30,000 feet in aluminum tubes while nibbling on roasted almonds? Drawing on recent developments in our understanding of human evolution, we consider what makes us distinctively smarter than other animals. Contrary to conventional wisdom, human brilliance emerges not from our innate brainpower or raw computational capacities, but from the sharing of information in communities and networks over generations. We review how larger, more diverse, and more optimally interconnected networks of minds give rise to faster innovation and how the cognitive products of this cumulative cultural evolutionary process feedback to make us individually "smarter"-in the sense of being better at meeting the challenges and problems posed by our societies and socioecologies. Here, we consider not only how cultural evolution supplies us with "thinking tools" (like counting systems and fractions) but also how it has shaped our ontologies (e.g., do germs and witches exist?) and epistemologies, including our notions of what constitutes a "good reason" or "good evidence" (e.g., are dreams a source of evidence?). Building on this, we consider how cultural evolution has organized and distributed cultural knowledge and cognitive tasks among subpopulations, effectively shifting both thinking and production to the level of the community, population, or network, resulting in collective information processing and group decisions. Cultural evolution can turn mindless mobs into wise crowds by facilitating and constraining cognition through a wide variety of epistemic institutions-political, legal, and scientific. These institutions process information and aid better decision-making by suppressing or encouraging the use of different cultural epistemologies and ontologies.

Not by intuitions alone: Institutions shape our ownership behaviour.

Every day, people make decisions about who owns what. What cognitive processes produce this? The target article emphasises the role of biologically evolved intuitions about competition and cooperation. We elaborate the role of cultural evolutionary processes for solving coordination problems. A model based fully on biological evolution misses important insights for explaining the arbitrariness and historical contingency in ownership beliefs.

The role of interactional and cognitive mechanisms in the evolution of (proto)language(s)

This paper discusses the role of interactional and cognitive mechanisms in the emergence of (proto)linguistic structures and the evolution of (proto)language(s). Both the social, interactive nature of human communication and the interactional timescale have received increasing attention in investigations of how structure emerges in language. This has also led to an increasing focus on the mechanisms involved in the dialogic co-construction of structure and meaning in interaction. These include ad hoc constructionalization, interactive alignment, conceptual pacts, reuse and modification, and local forms of entrenchment, routinisation and schematisation. Interactional and cognitive mechanisms like these do not only play a crucial role in the emergence of structure in modern languages. They can also help explain how the first (proto)constructions came into being in hominin interaction. Frequently re-occuring, temporary, local (proto)constructions acquired increasing degrees of entrenchment, which led to their subsequent diffusion throughout hominin communities. They were then subject to processes of conventionalisation and cumulative cultural evolution. This process is hypothesised to eventually have led to the gradual transition from protolanguage to language.

Gabriel Tarde and cultural evolution: The consequence of neglecting our Mendel

After documenting Tarde’s neglect and placing him in the 19th-century sociological context, this paper argues that his concept of “imitation” was important because social learning (writ small) or culture (writ large), a non-genetic form of heredity, means that a distinct cultural evolutionary process including variation and selection resulting in descent with modification is inevitable. Beginning in the last half of the 20th century there was a flowering of theorizing and research about cultural evolution across the humanities and social sciences and eventually about culture in general in sociology. Unfortunately, what should have been recognized as Tarde’s role as a forefather of these has only occasionally been recognized.

The importance of thinking about the future in culture and cumulative cultural evolution.

Thinking about possibilities plays a critical role in the choices humans make throughout their lives. Despite this, the influence of individuals' ability to consider what is possible on culture has been largely overlooked. We propose that the ability to reason about future possibilities or prospective cognition, has consequences for cultural change, possibly facilitating the process of cumulative cultural evolution. In particular, by considering potential future costs and benefits of specific behaviours, prospective cognition may lead to a more flexible use of cultural behaviours. In species with limited planning abilities, this may lead to the development of cultures that promote behaviours with future benefits, circumventing this limitation. Here, we examine these ideas from a comparative perspective, considering the relationship between human and nonhuman assessments of future possibilities and their cultural capacity to invent new solutions and improve them over time. Given the methodological difficulties of assessing prospective cognition across species, we focus on planning, for which we have the most data in other species. Elucidating the role of prospective cognition in culture will help us understand the variability in when and how we see culture expressed, informing ongoing debates, such as that surrounding which social learning mechanisms underlie culture. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

Subjective selection and the evolution of complex culture.

Why is culture the way it is? Here I argue that a major force shaping culture is subjective (cultural) selection, or the selective retention of cultural variants that people subjectively perceive as satisfying their goals. I show that people evaluate behaviors and beliefs according to how useful they are, especially for achieving goals. As they adopt and pass on those variants that seem best, they iteratively craft culture into increasingly effective-seeming forms. I argue that this process drives the development of many cumulatively complex cultural products, including effective technology, magic and ritual, aesthetic traditions, and institutions. I show that it can explain cultural dependencies, such as how certain beliefs create corresponding new practices, and I outline how it interacts with other cultural evolutionary processes. Cultural practices everywhere, from spears to shamanism, develop because people subjectively evaluate them to be effective means of satisfying regular goals.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF SELF-IMAGE OF THE SUBJECT OF POST-NATIVE CULTURE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF EMOTIONAL BEHAVIOR CHANGE

Background“Houtu” is the most unique cultural symbol and emotional link in the inheritance of agricultural cultural beliefs in ancient China, and it is also one of the important components of contemporary folk culture. Belief has been a unique psychological phenomenon of human beings since ancient times. It reflects human belief and compliance with the world outlook, outlook on life and values through psychological activities. “Houtu belief” originated from people's worship of land and first appeared in ancient agricultural society. Shanxi fenyin is the birthplace of “Houtu belief”, which is regarded as “the oldest ancestor and the most outstanding God in China”. Its temple is also a place for emperors of each dynasty to make pilgrimages and worship gods. It is also regarded as the crown of Houtu temple in China and the source of Houtu Royal worship. At the same time, with the rise of the study of regional emotional change, this study also helps to better understand the later beliefs.Subjects and MethodsStarting with the investigation of Houtu temple in fenyin County, Shanxi Province, this paper puts forward some problems, such as divine gender, image transformation and so on. From the pre Qin Dynasty to the early Western Han Dynasty, the Houtu God was the God of men, but now the Nuwa statue in Wanrong Houtu temple is the God of women. What's the reason? In view of this, this paper examines the evolution process and function of backland image from the perspective of belief psychology, and probes into its contemporary artistic value. In addition, this paper also uses Likert scoring method to evaluate the scale. Pearson correlation, standard deviation and statistical significance are combined to illustrate the correlation. The t-test of independent samples was used to verify the differences between male and female believers. According to the statistical value of emotion, participants were divided into three groups: low, medium and high groups. The questionnaire includes two kinds of anxiety, namely debilitating emotion and promoting emotion. Through t-test, univariate and multivariate analysis of variance and regression analysis, we investigated the relationship between time span, psychological activities and social status of believers of different beliefs and genders.ResultsAccording to the conclusion of this paper, the evolution of Houtu culture is an interactive process between objective social environment and subjective belief psychology. The image of Houtu culture and its belief activities have experienced a relatively unique cultural evolution process. The study studied male god believers and goddess believers, and found that compared with male god believers, goddess believers have much higher social status and audience. However, there was no significant difference in emotional level between male and female gods.With the development of society, it is gradually socialized and official. The image of backland has been recognized, re understood and recognized in the historical changes in order to adapt to and deal with social and cultural beliefs and historical context. It creatively reforms and integrates the national historical and cultural traditions and the social practical experience of various times, and constructs a new cultural form that respects the tradition and reflects the social practical experience.ConclusionsNowadays, in the multicultural context, “Houtu belief”, as a new national custom and cultural event, not only ensures the cultural legitimacy of Houtu culture in the local society, but also continues the inseparable relationship and memory between them and their ancestral civilization. It provides a new theoretical perspective and practical basis for the later research in the multicultural context. It can also promote the use of psychology to broaden the direction of studying national customs and culture.AcknowledgementSupported by the following projects, 2019 Jinzhong University “1331 Project” innovation team “Shanxi Cultural Heritage Inheritance and Provincial Cultural Tourism Strengthen Provincial Strategy Research” (JzxycxTD2019002). 2020 Shanxi Philosophy and Social Science Research Project: Research on animal Images of Chinese Buddhist Art (2020W184). University-level teaching reform project of Jinzhong University: Research on teaching reform of “Intangible Cultural Heritage” into “Colleges and University Zhejiang Provincial Heritage Conservation Technology Project (2020016).

Eco-Cultural Niche Breadth and Overlap Within the Cucuteni–Trypillia Culture Groups During the Eneolithic

One of the most applied tools for documenting cultural variability and for tracing cultural trajectories within the environmental context is eco-cultural niche modeling and its associated methodology. The niche breadth characterization quantitatively evaluates the links between a given adaptive system and ecological constraints, which provides valuable information for archeology. For this purpose, in this study, 10 independent climatic and topographic environmental variables were interpolated, and eco-cultural niche modeling techniques were used to determine whether these differences in geographic distributions and niche breadth are consequences of differences in five Cucuteni–Trypillia groups that flourished in Eastern Europe during the Eneolithic (cal. 5,400/5,300–2,800/2,700 BCE). Our results showed that the eco-cultural niches of Cucuteni–Trypillia groups are significantly overlapping, and the expansion trend of the last two cultural groups (Late Eneolithic–cal. 4,100/4,000–2,800/2,700 BCE) into the northeastern steppe regions was not due to ecological niche differences but rather a result of other cultural factors. Furthermore, we highlighted that the first three Cucuteni–Trypillia groups (Early-to-Middle Eneolithic—cal. 5,400/5,300–4,100/4,000 BCE) had slightly more constrained ecological niches in the mid-Holocene ecosystems than the Late Eneolithic groups. The results have significant implications for understanding the geographical range dynamics and distribution of the last great Chalcolithic society of Old Europe and contribute to the characterization of ecological niches they have exploited during the cultural evolutionary process.

Does autonomous moral reasoning favor consequentialism?

This paper addresses an important issue that has been commonly debated in moral psychology, namely the normative and metaethical implications of our differing intuitive responses to morally indistinguishable dilemmas. The prominent example of the asymmetry in our responses is that people often intuitively accept pulling a switch and deny pushing as a morally permissible way of sacrificing an innocent person to save more innocent people. Joshua Greene traces our negative responses to actions involving “up close and personal” harm back to our evolutionary past and argues that this undermines the normative power of deontological judgments. I reject Greene’s argument by arguing that our theoretical moral intuitions, as opposed to concrete and mid-level ones, are independent of direct evolutionary influence because they are the product of autonomous (gene-independent) moral reasoning. I then explain how both consequentialist and deontological theoretical intuitions, which enable us to make important moral distinctions and grasp objective moral facts, are produced by the exercise of autonomous moral reasoning and the process of cultural evolution. My conclusion will be that Greene is not justified in his claim that deontology is normatively inferior to consequentialism.

Assessing different historical pathways in the cultural evolution of economic development.

A huge number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the substantial diversity in economic performance we see in the present-day. There has been a growing appreciation that historical and ecological factors have contributed to social and economic development. However, it is not clear whether such factors have exerted a direct effect on modern productivity, or whether they influence economies indirectly by shaping the cultural evolution of norms and institutions. Here we analyse a global cross-national dataset to test between hypotheses involving a number of different ecological, historical, and proximate social factors and a range of direct and indirect pathways. We show that the historical timing of agriculture predicts the timing of the emergence of statehood, which in turn affects economic development indirectly through its effect on institutions. Ecological factors appear to affect economic performance indirectly through their historical effects on the development of agriculture and by shaping patterns of European settler colonization. More effective institutional performance is also predicted by lower-levels of in-group bias which itself appears related to the proportion of a nation's population that descends from European countries. These results support the idea that cultural evolutionary processes have been important in shaping the social norms and institutions that enable large-scale cooperation and economic growth in present-day societies.

Reconstructing social networks of Late Glacial and Holocene hunter-gatherers to understand cultural evolution.

Culture is increasingly being framed as a driver of human phenotypes and behaviour. Yet very little is known about variations in the patterns of past social interactions between humans in cultural evolution. The archaeological record, combined with modern evolutionary and analytical approaches, provides a unique opportunity to investigate broad-scale patterns of cultural change. Prompted by evidence that a population's social connectivity influences cultural variability, in this article, we revisit traditional approaches used to infer cultural evolutionary processes from the archaeological data. We then propose that frameworks considering multi-scalar interactions (from individuals to populations) over time and space have the potential to advance knowledge in cultural evolutionary theory. We describe how social network analysis can be applied to analyse diachronic structural changes and test cultural transmission hypotheses using the archaeological record (here specifically from the Marine Isotope Stage 3 ca 57–29 ka onwards). We argue that the reconstruction of prehistoric networks offers a timely opportunity to test the interplay between social connectivity and culture and ultimately helps to disentangle evolutionary mechanisms in the archaeological record.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.

Inequality, identity, and partisanship: How redistribution can stem the tide of mass polarization

The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes toward out-party members and policies has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as intergroup and racial conflict, have been identified as important contributing factors to this phenomenon known as "affective polarization." Research shows that partisan animosities are exacerbated when these interests and identities become aligned with existing party cleavages. In this paper, we use a model of cultural evolution to study how these forces combine to generate and maintain affective political polarization. We show that economic events can drive both affective polarization and the sorting of group identities along party lines, which, in turn, can magnify the effects of underlying inequality between those groups. But, on a more optimistic note, we show that sufficiently high levels of wealth redistribution through the provision of public goods can counteract this feedback and limit the rise of polarization. We test some of our key theoretical predictions using survey data on intergroup polarization, sorting of racial groups, and affective polarization in the United States over the past 50 y.

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.

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.

Social finance as cultural evolution, transmission bias, and market dynamics

The thoughts and behaviors of financial market participants depend upon adopted cultural traits, including information signals, beliefs, strategies, and folk economic models. Financial traits compete to survive in the human population and are modified in the process of being transmitted from one agent to another. These cultural evolutionary processes shape market outcomes, which in turn feed back into the success of competing traits. This evolutionary system is studied in an emerging paradigm, social finance. In this paradigm, social transmission biases determine the evolution of financial traits in the investor population. It considers an enriched set of cultural traits, both selection on traits and mutation pressure, and market equilibrium at different frequencies. Other key ingredients of the paradigm include psychological bias, social network structure, information asymmetries, and institutional environment.