Theory Of Cultural Evolution Research Articles

Understanding Cultural Fidelity

Abstract A leading idea of cultural evolutionary theory is that for human cultures to undergo evolutionary change, cultural transmission must generally serve as a high-fidelity copying process. In analogy to genetic inheritance, the high fidelity of human cultural transmission would act as a safeguard against the transformation and loss of cultural information, thus ensuring both the stability and longevity of cultural traditions. Cultural fidelity would also serve as the key difference-maker between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, explaining why only us humans, with our uniquely high-fidelity transmission capabilities, are capable of evolving and sustaining complex traditions. But what does it mean for cultural transmission to be more or less faithful? This article has two objectives. The first is to clarify the meaning and uses of the concept of cultural fidelity and to evaluate their explanatory import. I argue that cultural evolutionists use several fidelity concepts (episodic, propensity, and generalized fidelity), concepts that I will define and clarify. The second objective is to challenge the explanatory significance of a general notion of fidelity (generalized fidelity) as being both explanatorily meaningful and operationalizable. I conclude that if fidelity is to serve as an explanation of the key differences between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, then the concept will have to be redesigned and rely on different assumptions. 1Introduction2Generalized Fidelity2.1The need for an explanatory concept of fidelity2.2Three conditions for a general notion of cultural fidelity3Episodic Fidelity 3.1Measuring episodic fidelity3.2The relevance problem3.3Explanatory pluralism3.4The incommensurability of fidelity metrics4Propensity Fidelity5Fidelity as an Explanatory Concept 5.1Explaining cultural stability5.2Explaining human distinctiveness6Conclusion

Austrian Economics and the Evolutionary Paradigm*

Abstract This article discusses the challenges raised by the inclusion of evolutionary elements in the theories of Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek. Each adopted an idiosyncratic position in terms of method of inquiry, focus, and general message. The breadth of the topics and phenomena they cover testifies to the great variety of interpretations and potential uses of evolutionary concepts in economics. Menger, who made no reference to Darwin’s theory, advanced an “organic” view of the emergence of social institutions. Schumpeter elaborated an original theory of industrial development based on the recurrent emergence and dissemination of innovations. Hayek adopted the biological notion of group selection and made it the central element in his theory of cultural evolution and the rise of the free market. The chapter concludes with a preliminary evaluation of the possible role that evolutionary theorizing might play in the future development of Austrian economics.

Cultural entrenchment of folktales is encoded in language

In this interdisciplinary study, we explore the understudied effects of growing cultural entrenchment on the form of stories with a long reproduction history. Drawing on insight from literary theory, theoretical linguistics, and cultural evolution theory, we argue that changes in the cultural entrenchment of fairy tales and folk stories are reflected in (small) structural ‘mutations’ in the story. More specifically, we aim to show that with the increasing familiarity of “Little Red Riding Hood”, its story frame and characters have gradually become part of the author and audience’s shared world knowledge, which is encoded in the type of linguistic devices used to introduce the characters. To this end, we performed a Bayesian logistic regression analysis on a diachronic collection (late 18th century–2015) of the world’s most iconic fairy tale, using automatically generated time estimations for a subset of undated reproductions in the story lineage, and including these estimates and approximated measurement errors in the statistical model. Results show that there is indeed a marked increase of linguistic markers that indicate that the characters are already known or “accessible” to the audience. This development reflects the author’s changing intuitions and beliefs about the familiarity of the story, and, indirectly, the changing expectations of the story’s audience regarding the appearance of certain characters in the story frame. Notably, this study is the first to quantitatively describe the diachronic development of a story (and the concepts associated with it) into the realm of ‘shared knowledge’, showing that it is a slow and gradual process. The results help refine our understanding of cultural evolution as well as the workings of speaker-addressee dynamics. Conceptualising the observed linguistic mutations as an instance of guided variation, we argue that the increase of definite first mentions as a function of cultural entrenchment can be treated as an example of variation guided by pragmatic principles such as Grice’s Maxim of Quantity, making character introductions as informative as (and not more informative than) required.

Prestige-biased social learning: current evidence and outstanding questions

Cultural evolution theory posits that a major factor in human ecological success is our high-fidelity and selective social learning, which permits the accumulation of adaptive knowledge and skills over successive generations. One way to acquire adaptive social information is by preferentially copying competent individuals within a valuable domain (success bias). However, competence within a domain is often difficult or impossible to directly assess. Almost 20 years ago, Henrich and Gil-White (H&GW) suggested that people use indirect cues of success (e.g., differential levels of attention paid to models by other social learners) as adaptive short-cuts to select models from whom to learn. They called this use of indirect markers of success prestige bias. In this review, we re-visit H&GW’s proposal, examining the evidence amassed since for the adaptiveness and use of prestige bias in humans. First, we briefly outline H&GW’s theory. Second, we analyse whether prestige is associated with competence within valuable domains, which is a crucial assumption underlying the adaptiveness of prestige bias. Third, we discuss prestige cues that people use to infer success (e.g., the amount of voluntary deference and attention received by models). Fourth, we examine the evidence for and against the use of prestige bias in human adults and children. Finally, we point out limitations in the current literature and present new avenues for research on prestige bias.

Applying event history analysis to explain the diffusion of innovations in archaeological networks

The simple dyadic structure of a network is the basis for studying a wide variety of entities and their relationships, as well as the outcomes of processes such as the diffusion of innovations. Here, we apply models from event history analysis and cultural evolutionary theory to investigate whether and by what means network ties facilitated the transmission of certain cultural traits in past complex societies. To illustrate the application of these models to archaeological data, we examine the spread of dynastic rituals by analyzing data collected from Classic Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions. In addition to providing a cautionary tale for the construction of archaeological networks, the results of this study highlight the compatibility of cultural evolutionary and social network approaches to investigate the spread of novel traits.

Przyczyny popularności internetowych serwisów społecznościowych i plotkarskich

Wraz z pojawieniem się modelu Internetu określanego jako Web 2.0 narodził się nowy społeczny fenomen – media społeczne, a w nich serwisy społecznościowe oraz specjalna grupa serwisów internetowych określanych jako plotkarskie. Serwisy społecznościowe oraz serwisy typu plotkarskiego stale zyskują na popularności, czego owocem jest między innymi powoływanie coraz to nowych witryn tego rodzaju, a także utrzymująca się wysoko w rankingach ich pozycja (duża liczba odwiedzin). Dla wielu użytkowników serwisy tego typu są podstawowym źródłem informacji oraz jednocześnie najważniejszą cyfrową przestrzenią społecznej komunikacji. Ich nieustająca atrakcyjność skłoniła do sformułowania pytania, skąd bierze się ich popularność. W celu udzielenia odpowiedzi wykorzystano ustalenia psychologa rozwojowego Michaela Tomasello dotyczące kumulatywnej ewolucji kulturowej, a ściślej ten jej aspekt, który został poświęcony zagadnieniu rozumienia kategorii relacyjnych. Ostatecznie możliwe stało się przedstawienie następujących wniosków: z serwisów typu społecznościowego internauci dowiadują się tego, co jest związane z ich życiem i dorastaniem (doświadczenie najbliższych osób), dowiadują się zatem o innych podmiotach (relacje względem podmiotów). W przypadku serwisów typu plotkarskiego internauci dowiadują się o perypetiach i zdarzeniach losowych z życia osób medialnych. Dowiadując się o nich, przenoszą doświadczenie codziennego życia gwiazdy (sfera materialna, sfera emocjonalna) na własne, tym samym dowiadują się o określonych przedmiotach (relacje względem przedmiotów), a pośrednio również o danej osobie.

Keeping cultural in cultural evolutionary psychology: Culture shapes indigenous psychologies in specific ecologies.

In Cognitive Gadgets, Heyes seeks to unite evolutionary psychology with cultural evolutionary theory. Although we applaud this unifying effort, we find it falls short of considering how culture itself evolves to produce indigenous psychologies fitted to particular environments. We focus on mentalizing and autobiographical memory as examples of how socialization practices embedded within culture build cognitive adaptations.

Same Buildings Different Models: Further Studies in Ijo Vernacular Base Camp Architecture

This study examines architectural change of cultures stemming from the same ethnic source split between their homeland and other Diasporas. This change may range from minor deviations to drastic shifts away from an architectural norm and the accumulation of these shifts within a time frame constitutes variations. Based on fieldwork data obtained from an earlier study of 33 migrant fishing base camps in Bayelsa and Bakassi, this paper focuses on identifying variations between base camp dwellings of Ijo migrant fishermen, in the Bakassi Peninsula in Cameroon and Bayelsa State in Nigeria. The research uses a socio-cultural, comparative case study approach to investigate the specifics of base camp dwelling designs. This approach gives opportunities to explore the extent of the variations between the built forms, in response to internal and external forces of cultural dynamism. The qualitative methodology adopted focused on ascertaining variations through exterior evaluation of the design features, materials and construction process of the base camp dwellings. The study draws on the idea of the inevitability of cultural and social change over time to test for possibilities of variations as proposed in the theories of cultural dynamism and evolution. The findings suggest that some levels of variations between base camps models have occurred over time thus supporting the aforementioned theory and this change is attributable to an agglomeration of factors, rather than a single factor.

Power in Cultural Evolution and the Spread of Prosocial Norms

AbstractAccording to cultural evolutionary theory in the tradition of Boyd and Richerson, cultural evolution is driven by individuals’ learning biases, natural selection, and random forces. Learnin...

Kindergartens for civilisation: the intellectual origins of the St Louis public kindergarten

ABSTRACTThis article reexamines the intellectual history of the first public kindergartens, established in St Louis, Missouri, by William Torrey Harris and Elizabeth Blow in 1873. This piece argues that historians have overlooked a critical influence on the establishment of the first public kindergartens; namely, Harris and Blow’s conviction that children’s intellectual, psychological, and moral development recapitulated historical stages of human cultural and sociological evolution. This belief in cultural recapitulation deeply informed how they viewed the kindergarten curriculum and the role of public education—including the public kindergarten—in a liberal democratic society. Consequently, the first public kindergartens stand as a patent example, not of romantic reform, but of a late nineteenth-century state-centered liberalism grounded in Harris and Blow’s ethnocentric views of cultural and child development, as well as their Hegelian institutional idealism. Finally, this article illustrates how Harris and Blow transposed widely circulating theories of biological and cultural evolution, a belief in Western cultural superiority, and their vision of a civilised social order onto the biology and psychology of the child. As such, this paper illustrates how the metaphors and categories used to describe the stages of child development have made ethical claims with far-reaching implications.

Précis of Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

Abstract Cognitive gadgets are distinctively human cognitive mechanisms – such as imitation, mind reading, and language – that have been shaped by cultural rather than genetic evolution. New gadgets emerge, not by genetic mutation, but by innovations in cognitive development; they are specialised cognitive mechanisms built by general cognitive mechanisms using information from the sociocultural environment. Innovations are passed on to subsequent generations, not by DNA replication, but through social learning: People with new cognitive mechanisms pass them on to others through social interaction. Some of the new mechanisms, like literacy, have spread through human populations, while others have died out, because the holders had more students, not just more babies. The cognitive gadgets hypothesis is developed through four case studies, drawing on evidence from comparative and developmental psychology, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. The framework employed – cultural evolutionary psychology, a descendant of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory – addresses parallel issues across the cognitive and behavioural sciences. In common with evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) and the extended evolutionary synthesis, cultural evolutionary psychology underlines the importance of developmental processes and environmental factors in the emergence of human cognition. In common with computational approaches (deep learning, predictive coding, hierarchical reinforcement learning, causal modelling), it emphasises the power of general-purpose mechanisms of learning. Cultural evolutionary psychology, however, also challenges use of the behavioural gambit in economics and behavioural ecology, and rejects the view that human minds are composed of “innate modules” or “cognitive instincts.”

Comparative phylogenetic methods and the cultural evolution of medicinal plant use.

Human life depends on plant biodiversity and the ways in which plants are used are culturally determined. Whilst anthropologists have used phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) to gain an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the evolution of political, religious, social and material culture, plant use has been almost entirely neglected. Medicinal plants are of special interest because of their role in maintaining people's health across the world. PCMs in particular, and cultural evolutionary theory in general, provide a framework in which to study the diversity of medicinal plant applications cross-culturally, and to infer changes in plant use over time. These methods can be applied to single medicinal plants as well as the entire set of plants used by a culture for medicine, and they account for the non-independence of data when testing for floristic, cultural or other drivers of plant use. With cultural, biological and linguistic diversity under threat, gaining a deeper and broader understanding of the variation of medicinal plant use through time and space is pressing.

Compression in cultural evolution: Homogeneity and structure in the emergence and evolution of a large-scale online collaborative art project.

Cultural evolutionary theory provides a framework for explaining change in population-level distributions. A consistent finding in the literature is that multiple transmission episodes shape a distribution of cultural traits to become more compressible, i.e., a set of derived traits are more compressed than their ancestral forms. Importantly, this amplification of compressible patterns can become manifest in two ways, either via the homogenisation of variation or through the organisation of variation into structured and specialised patterns. Using a novel, large-scale dataset from Reddit Place, an online collaborative art project, we investigate the emergence and evolution of compressible patterns on a 1000x1000 pixel canvas. Here, all Reddit users could select a coloured pixel, place it on the canvas, and then wait for a fixed period before placing another pixel. By analysing all 16.5 million pixel placements by over 1 million individuals, we found that compression follows a quadratic trajectory through time. From a non-structured state, where individual artworks exist relatively independently from one another, Place gradually transitions to a structured state where pixel placements form specialised, interdependent patterns.

The Lecture Machine: A Cultural Evolutionary Model of Pedagogy in Higher Education.

The benefits of student-centered active-learning approaches are well established, but this evidence has not directly translated into instructors adopting these evidence-based methods in higher education. To date, promoting and sustaining pedagogical change through different initiatives has proven difficult, but research on pedagogical change is advancing. To this end, we examine pedagogical behaviors through a cultural evolutionary model that stresses the global nature of the issue, the generational time that change requires, and complications introduced by academic career trajectories. We first provide an introduction to cultural evolutionary theory before describing our model, which focuses on how cultural transmission processes and selection events at different career phases shape not only who teaches in higher education, but also how they choose to teach. We leverage our model to make suggestions for expediting change in higher education. This includes reforming pedagogy in departments that produce PhD students with the greatest chance of obtaining tenure-track positions.

The Persistence of a Local Dialect When a National Standard Language is Present: An Evolutionary Dynamics Model of Cultural Diversity.

In recent decades, cultural diversity loss has been a growing issue, which can be analyzed mathematically through the use of the formalism of the theory of cultural evolution. We here study the evolutionary dynamics of dialects in order to find the key processes for mitigating the loss of language diversity. We define dialects as different speech systems of the same language which are mutually intelligible. Specifically, we focus on the survival of a local dialect when competing against a national standard language, with the latter giving an advantage in occupational and economic contexts. We assume individuals may use different dialects, in response to two different situations: they may use the national language in a formal workplace, while they may use a local dialect in family or close friend meetings. We consider the choice of a dialect is guided by two forces: (1) differential attractiveness of the local/standard language and (2) willingness to speak the same dialect (conformity factor) inside a private group. We found that the evolutionary outcome critically depends on how conformity works. Conformity enhances the effect of differential attractiveness between the local dialect and the standard language if conformity works favoring only those states in which all speakers use the same dialect (unanimity pressure model), but conformity has no effect at all if it works in proportion to the fraction among peers (peer pressure model).

Bringing Nostalgia Home: Switzerland and the Swiss Chalet

This article presents an interpretation of nostalgia in which it is traced back to its original meaning as an emotion concerned not with time, but with place, the Alpine mountains of Switzerland, which in the early nineteenth century became associated with notions of the medieval past. With recourse to nineteenth-century anthropological theories of cultural evolution, an attempt is made to explain the term’s shift in meaning. Nostalgia, as an emotion glorifying authenticity, was and still is propelled by imagery created in a wide variety of media. It found early and long-lasting expression in the international popularity of the Swiss chalet.

Cultural evolution of normative motivations for sustainable behaviour

An emerging literature on the evolution of culture can offer new explanations for how norms encourage or obstruct sustainable practices. In particular, dual-inheritance theory describes how interactions between genetic and cultural evolution give rise, in part, to prosociality. Based on this theory, we identify the concept of normative motivation — internalized desires to follow and enforce norms. We discuss the utility of this concept in progressing two major research agendas across the social and behavioural sciences: the impact of motivation on cognition and normative behaviour, and the influence of norms on the policy process. Key contributions from considering norms from this evolutionary perspective include: (1) an improved model of the motivations that lead individuals to follow norms, (2) clarification of how and when incentives successfully generate motivations favouring sustainability and (3) new ideas for leveraging the influence of norms in public policy beyond financial incentives and education campaigns. Theories of cultural evolution can help explain how norms that are externally enforced are internalized to become intrinsic motivations to behave sustainably. This knowledge is useful for developing interventions for behavioural change.

The Evolution of Culture as a New Pattern for Comparative Religion

AbstractIn his new book, Paden argues that evolutionary theory creates new and fertile ground for the comparative study of religion. I suggest that extending Paden’s argument to embrace new theories of cultural evolution will continue to broaden our ability understand the origins of both the similarities and differences in religions across societies. Religions are cultural systems and as such an understanding of our shared biology can only explain a limited amount of what religion is and does. I discuss how new cultural evolutionary theories that examine cultural variation and cultural change based on how humans learn and transmit cultural content and can improve the theoretical foundations of comparative studies of religion. Exploring different mechanisms of cultural learning can help explain why certain features of religion are found across a wide variety of religions while others are only found in specific groups.

Evolutionary demography of age at last birth: integrating approaches from human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution.

Cultural evolutionary theory and human behavioural ecology offer different, but compatible approaches to understanding human demographic behaviour. For much of their 30 history, these approaches have been deployed in parallel, with few explicit attempts to integrate them empirically. In this paper, we test hypotheses drawn from both approaches to explore how reproductive behaviour responds to cultural changes among Mosuo agriculturalists of China. Specifically, we focus on how age at last birth (ALB) varies in association with temporal shifts in fertility policies, spatial variation and kinship ecologies. We interpret temporal declines in ALB as plausibly consistent with demographic front-loading of reproduction in light of fertility constraints and later ages at last birth in matrilineal populations relative to patrilineal ones as consistent with greater household cooperation for reproductive purposes in the former. We find little evidence suggesting specific transmission pathways for the spread of norms regulating ALB, but emphasize that the rapid pace of change strongly suggests that learning processes were involved in the general decline in ALB over time. The different predictions of models we employ belie their considerable overlap and the potential for a synthetic approach to generate more refined tests of evolutionary hypotheses of demographic behaviour.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution’.

Current and potential roles of archaeology in the development of cultural evolutionary theory.

Archaeology has much to contribute to the study of cultural evolution. Empirical data at archaeological timescales are uniquely well suited to tracking rates of cultural change, detecting phylogenetic signals among groups of artefacts, and recognizing long-run effects of distinct cultural transmission mechanisms. Nonetheless, these are still relatively infrequent subjects of archaeological analysis and archaeology's potential to help advance our understanding of cultural evolution has thus far been largely unrealized. Cultural evolutionary models developed in other fields have been used to interpret patterns identified in archaeological records, which in turn provides independent tests of these models' predictions, as demonstrated here through a study of late Prehistoric stone projectile points from the US Southwest. These tests may not be straightforward, though, because archaeological data are complex, often representing events aggregated over many years (or centuries or millennia), while processes thought to drive cultural evolution (e.g. biased learning) operate on much shorter timescales. To fulfil archaeology's potential, we should continue to develop models specifically tailored to archaeological circumstances, and explore ways to incorporate the rich contextual data produced by archaeological research.This article is part of the theme issue 'Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution'.