Theory Of Cultural Evolution Research Articles

The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes (review)

Reviewed by: The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes Martha P. Hixon (bio) The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. By Jack Zipes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. This is the latest in a prodigious output of publications over the past three decades through which Jack Zipes has developed his theories regarding the cultural positions of folktales in Western society. As is typical, Zipes ranges far and wide, juxtaposing a disparate set of topics (some of which he has discussed before) in an attempt to further demonstrate the theory he set forth in Why Fairy Tales Stick (2006) and has developed in more recent articles such as "What Makes a Repulsive Frog So Appealing" (2008) and "The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture" (2011): that the cultural evolutionary theory of memes can account for the fluid nature of folktales and their continuing existence. Chapter one reiterates that theory; chapter [End Page 243] two considers the work of Catherine d'Aulnoy in the development of the French fairy tale tradition from oral form to print; and chapter three returns to the story of "Bluebeard" by Charles Perrault, this time focusing on Catherine Breillat's 2008 film version as a feminist response. As a reader, I was particularly interested in chapters four and five, which investigate (or purport to investigate) topics that I teach and research on but about which little has been written. In chapter four, "Witch as Fairy/Fairy as Witch: Unfathomable Baba Yagas," Zipes's purported aim is to position Baba Yaga in the historical development of the witch figure in European folk literature. To do so, he presents summaries of the work done on Baba Yaga and Russian folk literature by Andreas Johns, Vladimir Propp, and W. R. S. Ralston. The discussion is useful in that it brings such work together, but beyond that Zipes has little to contribute about her; nor does he actually offer much in the way of objective proof for the assertion that begins and ends the chapter: that witches—along with fairies, mermaids, and other supernatural female creatures—are a later incarnation of the pagan and Greco-Roman goddesses. The title of chapter five, "The Tales of Innocent Persecuted Heroines and Their Neglected Female Storytellers and Collectors," is somewhat misleading, in that both it and the first few paragraphs allude to the idea of the Innocent Persecuted Heroines tale type, the subject of a special issue of Western Folklore back in 1993 but little discussed since then. However, Zipes uses the term not to investigate those particular tales but rather to present similar, lesser-known tales by female storytellers and collectors from the nineteenth century, tales which he says are "innocently persecuted" because they have been ignored in favor of the more patriarchally situated Grimms' stories. This chapter is, like the others, pretty much a stand-alone piece that provides interesting reading but only nominally shores up the claim that this book charts a history of the development of fairy tales. Here Zipes addresses tales and tellers who have been left out of the canon and ignored even by feminist scholars, but fails to provide a closely examined argument regarding why this is the case, or why popular culture continues to favor the stories that it does. Chapters six and seven continue this focus on lesser-known retellers, with discussions first of obscure nineteenth-century male collectors and then of late twentieth-century female visual retellers. The purpose of chapter six, "Giuseppe Pitrè and the Great Collectors of Folk Tales in the Nineteenth Century," seems to be that of filling out our understanding of the establishment of the folktale canons by bringing to light collectors who were active at the time but who have not been translated, overshadowed by the popularity of the Grimms, Andersen, and others. Zipes spends a good bit of the chapter exploring the work of Guiseppe Pitrè as an example; yet again, however, he has no clear answers as to why Pitrè and others have been largely ignored. Chapter seven, "Fairy-Tale Collisions, or the Explosion of a Genre," focuses mostly on...

A theory of supply-driven evolution for cultural evolution

A process akin to biological evolution is one of the most promising candidates today for producing a general theory of cultural evolution. Current understanding of this process focuses on both drift as well as the selection of cultural variation as the primary vehicles of cultural change. Here, I show that natural selection can produce cultural change in the direction of the generation of cultural variation. I show how this mechanism can result in long-term cultural trends and how it adds to known mechanisms. I present examples to show how this theory is compatible with documented cultural and historical change.

Commentary on “An evolutionary framework for cultural change: Selectionism versus communal exchange” by Liane Gabora

There is surely some truth to the notion that culture evolves, but the Darwinian view of culture is trivial. Gabora does two things in this paper. First, she levels a reasoned and devastating attack on the adequacy of a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution, showing that cultural evolution violates virtually all prerequisites to be encompassed by Darwin's standard theory. Second, she advances the central concept that it is whole world views that evolve. A world view emerges when the capacity of memories to evoke one another surpasses a phase transition yielding a richly interconnected conceptual web, a world view. She proposes that cultural evolves not through a Darwinian process such as meme theory, but through communal exchange of facets of world views. Each section of her argument is completely convincing.

Modelling the truth of scientific beliefs with cultural evolutionary theory

Evolutionary anthropologists and archaeologists have been considerably successful in modelling the cumulative evolution of culture, of technological skills and knowledge in particular. Recently, one of these models has been introduced in the philosophy of science by De Cruz and De Smedt (Philos Stud 157:411–429, 2012), in an attempt to demonstrate that scientists may collectively come to hold more truth-approximating beliefs, despite the cognitive biases which they individually are known to be subject to. Here we identify a major shortcoming in that attempt: De Cruz & De Smedt’s mathematical model makes one particularly strong tractability assumption that causes the model to largely miss its target (namely, truth accumulation in science), and that moreover conflicts with empirical observations. The second, more constructive part of the paper presents an alternative, agent-based model, which allows one to much better examine the conditions for scientific progress and decline.

Terrorist networks and the lethality of attacks: an illustrative agent based model on evolutionary principles

A data base developed from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism’s (MIPT) Terrorism Knowledge Base for the years 1998–2005 was provided to participants in the workshop. The distribution of fatalities in terrorist attacks is, like many outcomes of human social and economic processes, heavily right-skewed. We propose an agent based model to analyse this, and to enable generalisations to be made from the historical data set. The model is inspired by modelling developments in cultural evolutionary theory. We argue that a more appropriate ‘null’ model of behaviour in the social sciences is on based upon the principle of copying, rather than the economic assumption of rationality in the standard social science model.

Introduction to a special issue on biologically inspired analysis of social systems: a security informatics perspective

Many national security challenges have at their core the problem of understanding and predicting the behavior of social systems, for instance in order to discover groups of individuals of interest, characterize their current activities and motivations, and anticipate the way they are likely to behave in the future. However, despite the allocation of vast resources to the task of analyzing and forecasting social behavior, the utility of such analysis remains limited. Biologically inspired (BI) approaches to analyzing complex systems appear to offer significant potential for this problem domain. For example, rapid progress is being made in the application of BI algorithms to challenging questions in the fields of financial market analysis, cyber security, and large-scale optimization. The current special issue brings together experts from a variety of fields to try and build on the potential of gaining traction on complex security problems by drawing on BI approaches. The genesis of the special issue was a series of workshops sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security on this theme. The special issue brings together an extraordinarily diverse group of researchers from fields across the social and hard science in areas such as biology, computer science, ecology, economics, engineering, psychology, and security studies. As one might expect the papers in this issue often take very different approaches to examining the issue of how BI approaches can help us in analyzing complex systems to understand why and how individuals might behave in certain ways within the context of a social system and specifically within a security perspective. The papers examine issues as diverse as information analysis for intelligence purposes, how to respond to, or predict the growing threat of cyber warfare how to understand the lethality of different terrorist organization and how leaders can help individuals in their organization deal more effectively with the increased stress that a more diffuse and dangerous security environment has engendered. The authors use a wide array of approaches from computational experiments, to agent based modeling and ethnographic studies. Despite the diversity we believe that the papers hold together very well as a broader and multi-disciplinary effort to increase our understanding of how Biologically inspired can better help us understand the changing security environment the United States currently faces. Rafe Sagarin and Terence Taylor provide a broad theoretical overview to how our understanding of biological evolutionary systems and the frameworks that have been developed to think about them can be applied to the security challenges that societies face. Saragin and Taylor are particularly interested in how our understanding of natural adaptability can be applied to the social problems of security. They provide a very useful discussion of adaptability that clarifies why the theoretical meaning of adaptability which is often used in security contexts is unclear and counterproductive. By clarifying the concept of adaptability and drawing directly from existing biological knowledge about the concept Sagarin and Taylor are able to outline four useful lessons which so far have not been applied in a security context but which they make a compelling argument would be much to our advantage if they were. Also drawing on a broad BI inspired perspective, Paul Ormerod’s paper leverages evolutionary theory to create an agent based modeling (ABM) approach to help better understand the distribution of fatalities in terrorist attacks. Basing his analysis on data of such attacks Ormerod focuses on dealing with the problem that such attacks are, like many human phenomena, heavily right skewed. From a cultural evolutionary theory perspective Ormerod argues that “copying” is a better explanation of human behavior as it relates to the lethal question at

Adult Learners in a Novel Environment Use Prestige-Biased Social Learning

Social learning (learning from others) is evolutionarily adaptive under a wide range of conditions and is a long-standing area of interest across the social and biological sciences. One social-learning mechanism derived from cultural evolutionary theory is prestige bias, which allows a learner in a novel environment to quickly and inexpensively gather information as to the potentially best teachers, thus maximizing his or her chances of acquiring adaptive behavior. Learners provide deference to high-status individuals in order to ingratiate themselves with, and gain extended exposure to, that individual. We examined prestige-biased social transmission in a laboratory experiment in which participants designed arrowheads and attempted to maximize hunting success, measured in caloric return. Our main findings are that (1) participants preferentially learned from prestigious models (defined as those models at whom others spent longer times looking), and (2) prestige information and success-related information were used to the same degree, even though the former was less useful in this experiment than the latter. We also found that (3) participants were most likely to use social learning over individual (asocial) learning when they were performing poorly, in line with previous experiments, and (4) prestige information was not used more often following environmental shifts, contrary to predictions. These results support previous discussions of the key role that prestige-biased transmission plays in social learning.

The Selective Persistence of Local Ecological Knowledge: Honey Collecting with the Jenu Kuruba in South India

IntroductionAjungletribe,theJenu-Kurubasgatherthehoneyinthemonth of June. Having hit upon a hive in a hollow tree,theytieabamboo,theshortcutbranchesofwhichforma convenient ladder, to the tree during the day time andat night,provided with a basket attached to a long ropeand lined with leaves, they climb up with a stronglysmoking torch which they hold near the hive. Thealarmed and half stunned bees fly away and their hon-eycombsareremovedandletdowninthebasket.Whilstthus engaged, the Kurubas have a peculiar song, madefor the occasion and expressing their feigned sympathywith the spoilated bees, so rudely disturbed of theirnightly rest. (Richter 1870: 73)Honey collection has seemingly changed little among theforest dwelling Jenu Kuruba in Kodagu, Southwest India,although many changes have come to the subcontinent sincethe time of the British Raj. The introduction of automobiles,cell phones, and cheap plastic can seem to overwhelm localcultural diversity with foreign influences. Yet some traditionsremain extraordinarily stable across generations even in theabsence of written records and formal instruction. Cultural evo-lution theory addresses how cultural traits within a populationpersistthroughinteractionamongecological,social,andindivid-ual influences (Boyd and Richerson 1985). When population-and individual-level factors both promote the continued motiva-tion to learn a culturaltraitand constantaccessto demonstrators,then we expect to see long-term persistence. If either of theseprocesses is unsupportive to cultural transmission, either nomotivation to learn or nobody to learn from, then we expect tosee change in and loss of cultural knowledge over time.In the first part of this paper, we examine the currentecological and sociological pressures on the transmission ofhoney collecting knowledge. We show how this body ofculturalknowledgeiscorrelatedtoitscompatibilitywithotherskills,preferencesandnorms,learningcontext,andthecurrentstate of the environment. Henrich and Henrich (2010)dem-onstrate the adaptive value of Fijian food taboos during preg-nancy and breastfeeding due to selective learning on the partof mothers who copy the knowledge of elder kin and pres-tigious individuals in their community. However, theresearchers do not attempt to understand how factorsoutside this narrow cultural domain can affect the acquisitionof food taboos. Current studies of social learning and culturalevolution tend to favor quantitative models that often neglect

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.

Population thinking and natural selection in dual-inheritance theory.

A deflationary perspective on theories of cultural evolution, in particular dual-inheritance theory, has recently been proposed by Lewens. On this ‘pop-culture’ analysis, dual-inheritance theorists apply population thinking to cultural phenomena, without claiming that cultural items evolve by natural selection. This paper argues against this pop-culture analysis of dual-inheritance theory. First, it focuses on recent dual-inheritance models of specific patterns of cultural change. These models exemplify population thinking without a commitment to natural selection of cultural items. There are grounds, however, for doubting the added explanatory value of the models in their disciplinary context—and thus grounds for engaging in other potentially explanatory projects based on dual-inheritance theory. One such project is suggested by advocates of the theory. Some of the motivational narratives that they offer can be interpreted as setting up an adaptationist project with regard to cumulative change in cultural items. We develop this interpretation here. On it, dual-inheritance theory features two interrelated selection processes, one on the level of genetically inherited learning mechanisms, another on the level of the cultural items transmitted through these mechanisms. This interpretation identifies a need for further modelling efforts, but also offers scope for enhancing the explanatory power of dual-inheritance theory.

Some problems of evolutionary epistemology: Hayek’s view on evolution of market

This paper aims to present Hayek?s view of cultural evolution as an important contribution to contemporary evolutionary epistemology. However, despite the importance of Hayek?s theory of cultural evolution, the tension between his concept of rational liberalism and evolutionary epistemology will be pointe out. This tension limits Hayek?s understanding of cultural evolution. Hayek?s conception of rational liberalism emphasizes the values of individual freedom and benefits of the market system. The term evolutionary epistemology includes the economic phenomena that occur without the participation of consciousness, on the one hand, and activities with the element of purposefulness and intelligibility, on the other.

On Human Evolution in History: The Case of France

A history of France from the fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution employed population theories of secular cycles, cultural evolution, and collective learning. It is a Big History project supervised by the founder of the discipline, David Christian, and it is written in collaboration with several theorists from the natural sciences. It uses population-thinking to search for broad trends that might explain historical events, the rise and fall of empires, and technological progress. It maps a trajectory of historical processes from the birth of France to the modern age, and takes the controversial step of attempting to predict where that trajectory may be going in the future. This may be of direct use to those who will face population pressure and environmental crises in the later twenty-first century. It challenges many prejudices the historical discipline currently holds against collaboration between the human and natural sciences, and encourages specialists to place their work in a wider context. The history itself is chronological, and follows the periods of rise and decline in France, and explains various phenomena in human development for which there is currently no clear explanation.

Be Fruitful and Multiply: Growth, Reason, and Cultural Group Selection in Hayek and Darwin

The theory of cultural evolution proposed by economist Friedrich August von Hayek is without doubt the most harshly criticized component in his highly prolific intellectual corpus. Hayek depicted the emergence of the market order as the unintended consequence of an evolutionary process in which groups whose rules of behavior led to a comparative increase in population and wealth were favored over others. Key to Hayek’s theory was the claim that the rules of the market, on which modern civilization relies, evolved at the meta-individual level and therefore surpass human reason. Hayek believed that his theory provided scientific explanation for the superiority of the market order over rational planning. In this article, I conduct a selective comparison between Hayek’s and Darwin’s theories of cultural group selection and analyze the role that demographic growth and reason play in their respective accounts. I first present Hayek’s theory of cultural group selection, its sources of inspiration, and its important place in his intellectual legacy. I then compare Hayek’s claims to Darwin’s views and highlight fundamental differences in their evaluation of the role of reason in moral evolution. Finally, I offer some comments concerning the place assigned to demographic growth in Hayek’s theory and his over-reliance on economics in explaining cultural evolution.

Towards unification of the socio‐ecological sciences: the value of coupled models

.The major environmental problems of the twenty‐first century, including climate change, water scarcity, pollution and resource exhaustion, represent a new category of crisis and highlight the desperate need for an integrated science of socio‐ecological phenomena. To help establish the foundations of such a science, we explore three traditions of mathematical theory: the Lotka–Volterra interactions of ecological theory, niche construction models of population genetics, and theory from the gene–culture coevolution tradition. We review the theoretical tools of each of these traditions in explaining cultural articulation with the environment. Although the theoretical core of the science we propose does not exist, cultural evolutionary theory supplies useful tools to analyse endogenous culture, cultural dynamics, and deeply rooted behavioural links to the environment. We also present a coupled model for demonstration, and suggest that coupled socio‐ecological models can provide a formal theory to help address the emergent socio‐ecological problems of the future.

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.

La evolución del constructivismo (desde una perspectiva constructivista)

This article discusses the evolutionary conditions of constructivism on society, from Luhmann's social systems theory. First, we review some of the basic notions of the theory of social and cultural evolution, focusing on the concepts of variation, selection and stabilization of semantics in expectation structures. We suggest that these elements find empirical scenarios suitable for observation in scientific and philosophical communications, as well as in cultural productions. Our discussion leads to the question regarding the likeliness of stabilization of constructivism in expectations that operate in everyday life. We conclude with the hypothesis that constructivism -on its expressions on several systems- constitutes an evolutionary acquisition, as it allows the coupling of new and more complex communications in contemporary society.

Caught in the Crossfire? Economic Injustice and Prophetic Motivation in Eighth-Century Judah

Prophetic complaints against landownership abuse that are attributed to eighth-century Judah pose an interpretive problem: their contextual ambiguity. Passages like as Isa. 5.8-10 decry land seizures but lack key socio-economic variables: motivations and the identities of perpetrators and victims. Faced with scarce archaeological and biblical evidence pertaining to landownership in the eighth century, several scholars have turned to the social sciences for clues. Marvin Chaney and D.N. Premnath have found interpretive value in cultural-evolutionary theory. Cultural-evolutionary theorists, like Gerhard Lenski and Timothy Earle, find that recurring patterns tend to emerge as agrarian societies experience rapid economic development and increased trade, including an abandonment of subsistence strategies, land consolidation, and a hoarding of the benefits amongst elites. While Chaney and Premnath have successfully used this model to explore economic abuses attributed to eighth-century Judah, when the region was absorbed into the Assyrian trade nexus, the effects of these recurring societal patterns on religious institutions have yet to be explored by biblical scholars. Religious practices and norms that support outmoded economic strategies tend to be overturned during these transitional periods to accommodate new economic goals. While some religious leaders are forced to choose between either honouring long-held traditions or capitulating to a new economic environment, others find that their place in society is rendered obsolete. Through considering these cultural-evolutionary patterns alongside Hezekiah’s religious reforms, this paper explores the possibility that prophetic authors who condemned the displacement of farmers may have also been protesting their own displacement in an evolving Judean society.

Mode and tempo in the evolution of socio-political organization: reconciling ‘Darwinian’ and ‘Spencerian’ evolutionary approaches in anthropology

Traditional investigations of the evolution of human social and political institutions trace their ancestry back to nineteenth century social scientists such as Herbert Spencer, and have concentrated on the increase in socio-political complexity over time. More recent studies of cultural evolution have been explicitly informed by Darwinian evolutionary theory and focus on the transmission of cultural traits between individuals. These two approaches to investigating cultural change are often seen as incompatible. However, we argue that many of the defining features and assumptions of 'Spencerian' cultural evolutionary theory represent testable hypotheses that can and should be tackled within a broader 'Darwinian' framework. In this paper we apply phylogenetic comparative techniques to data from Austronesian-speaking societies of Island South-East Asia and the Pacific to test hypotheses about the mode and tempo of human socio-political evolution. We find support for three ideas often associated with Spencerian cultural evolutionary theory: (i) political organization has evolved through a regular sequence of forms, (ii) increases in hierarchical political complexity have been more common than decreases, and (iii) political organization has co-evolved with the wider presence of hereditary social stratification.

Corporate Entrepreneurship At GE And Intel

This is the first of three planned articles concerning Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE). The author is a former entrepreneur practitioner who secured an earned doctorate from Pepperdine University in 2008, and who now teaches at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. In this article the author explores the concept of Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) using case study methodology to connect previous scholarly research with data collected from successful companies. The paper discusses the problem of sustaining CE as organizations mature using Hayek’s Theory of Cultural Evolution as a framework. The author suggests that corporate entrepreneurship, often called intrapreneurship, while critical for sustaining competitiveness and increasing stakeholder value, often poses a dilemma for large organizations. The different processes and strategies these companies use to attempt to sustain CE are outlined together with suggestions for integrating corporate entrepreneurship into any organization’s culture, strategy, and management process. Finally, recommendations are provided as to how organizational leaders can successfully integrate corporate entrepreneurship into any organization’s strategy and management systems.

Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice.

Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion's effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a broad sample of American adults revealed that distrust characterized anti-atheist prejudice but not anti-gay prejudice (Study 1). In subsequent studies, distrust of atheists generalized even to participants from more liberal, secular populations. A description of a criminally untrustworthy individual was seen as comparably representative of atheists and rapists but not representative of Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, or homosexuals (Studies 2-4). In addition, results were consistent with the hypothesis that the relationship between belief in God and atheist distrust was fully mediated by the belief that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them (Study 4). In implicit measures, participants strongly associated atheists with distrust, and belief in God was more strongly associated with implicit distrust of atheists than with implicit dislike of atheists (Study 5). Finally, atheists were systematically socially excluded only in high-trust domains; belief in God, but not authoritarianism, predicted this discriminatory decision-making against atheists in high trust domains (Study 6). These 6 studies are the first to systematically explore the social psychological underpinnings of anti-atheist prejudice, and converge to indicate the centrality of distrust in this phenomenon.