scholarly journals Replication and individual-level emergence are not sufficient for understanding cultural transmission and the evolution of human culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 74-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inès M. Daras ◽  
Franz J. Weissing
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Human Culture

Genomic Imprinting and the Cognitive Architecture Mediating Human Culture

2001 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Michael Brown
Keyword(s):  
Genomic Imprinting ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Transmitted Information ◽  
Human Culture

AbstractGenomic imprinting may be implicated in the origin and maintenance of the cognitive architecture required for cultural transmission. Relatedness asymmetries are expected to lead to increases in the receptibility of matrilineally transmitted information. This may help explain why maternal genes contribute preferentially to the neocortex. That is, maternal genes could influence biases in the transmission and/or acquisition of information. This perspective is complementary to gene-culture coevolutionary approaches.

scholarly journals Content bias in the cultural evolution of house finch song

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mason Youngblood ◽  
David Lahti
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Population Level ◽  
R Package ◽  
House Finch ◽  
Population Declines ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Transmission Mechanisms ◽  
Content Bias ◽  
Approximate Bayesian

In this study, we used a longitudinal dataset of house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) song recordings spanning four decades in the introduced eastern range to assess how individual-level cultural transmission mechanisms drive population-level changes in birdsong. First, we developed an agent-based model (available as a new R package called TransmissionBias) that simulates the cultural transmission of house finch song given different parameters related to transmission biases, or biases in social learning that modify the probability of adoption of particular cultural variants. Next, we used approximate Bayesian computation and machine learning to estimate what parameter values likely generated the temporal changes in diversity in our observed data. We found evidence that strong content bias, likely targeted towards syllable complexity, plays a central role in the cultural evolution of house finch song in western Long Island. Frequency and demonstrator biases appear to be neutral or absent. Additionally, we estimated that house finch song is transmitted with extremely high fidelity. Future studies should use our simulation framework to better understand how cultural transmission and population declines influence song diversity in wild populations.

scholarly journals Conformity bias in the cultural transmission of music sampling traditions

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (9) ◽  
pp. 191149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mason Youngblood
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Neutral Evolution ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Online Databases ◽  
Approximate Bayesian ◽  
Cultural Evolutionary ◽  
Turn Over

One of the fundamental questions of cultural evolutionary research is how individual-level processes scale up to generate population-level patterns. Previous studies in music have revealed that frequency-based bias (e.g. conformity and novelty) drives large-scale cultural diversity in different ways across domains and levels of analysis. Music sampling is an ideal research model for this process because samples are known to be culturally transmitted between collaborating artists, and sampling events are reliably documented in online databases. The aim of the current study was to determine whether frequency-based bias has played a role in the cultural transmission of music sampling traditions, using a longitudinal dataset of sampling events across three decades. Firstly, we assessed whether turn-over rates of popular samples differ from those expected under neutral evolution. Next, we used agent-based simulations in an approximate Bayesian computation framework to infer what level of frequency-based bias likely generated the observed data. Despite anecdotal evidence of novelty bias, we found that sampling patterns at the population-level are most consistent with conformity bias. We conclude with a discussion of how counter-dominance signalling may reconcile individual cases of novelty bias with population-level conformity.

scholarly journals Moralization of Religiosity Explains Worldwide Trends in Religious Belief

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Abrams ◽  
Joshua Conrad Jackson ◽  
Andrew Vonasch ◽  
Kurt Gray
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Longitudinal Survey ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Reputational Costs

Religion is an enduring part of human culture, but religious belief is declining in some societies. What explains which regions secularize and which individuals leave their faiths? We propose that secularization is inversely related to the “moralization of religion:” the belief that religion is essential to morality. Moralization of religiosity likely emerged as a by-product of the historical rise of prosocial religions, but we propose that it has an additional side-effect—it discourages deconversion due to perceived reputational costs. We further suggest that cultural differences in the moralization of religiosity foreshadow patterns of nation-level secularization and individual-level deconversion. Our model is supported by historical cross-cultural, retrospective longitudinal, survey, and experimental studies (N = 221,202), which show that the moralization of religiosity inhibits both secularization across nations and deconversion across individuals, and also fosters prejudice against nonbelievers.

Mechanisms by which parasites influence cultures, and why they matter

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Schaller ◽  
Damian R. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Developmental Plasticity ◽  
Genetic Evolution ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Rigorous Research ◽  
Mediating Mechanisms

AbstractAt least four conceptually distinct mechanisms may mediate relations between parasite-stress and cultural outcomes: genetic evolution, developmental plasticity, neurocognitive flexibility, and cultural transmission. These mechanisms may operate independently or in conjunction with one another. Rigorous research on specific mediating mechanisms is required to more completely articulate implications of parasite stress on human psychology and human culture.

Transportation, Transformation, and Metaphoricity

2019 ◽  
pp. 28-51
Author(s):  
Veronika Pöhnl
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Cultural Media

This chapter discusses similarities of and differences between the epistemological premises of ANT and German media theory concerning concepts of transmission. The applicability of ANT for media investigations and the compatibility of ANT concepts in media studies have been discussed intensively for several years now. The profound similarities as well as the critical differences in the study of the material conditions of human culture have also stimulated current reconsiderations and reformulations in cultural media studies, as German media theory is most commonly called in Germany. The chapter gives a brief overview of recently published approaches to cultural techniques and intersections of media and techno-philosophy that are increasingly being translated into English and therefore also internationally accessible, alongside with the discussion concerning their compatibility with ANT in respect of cultural transmission.

Who, Being Loved, is Poor?: Poverty, Marriage, and Changing Family Structures in the Canadian Arctic

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elspeth Ready
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Married Couples ◽  
Economic Cooperation ◽  
Household Composition ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Household Heads ◽  
The Individual

In Kangiqsujuaq, Nunavik, household composition has changed drastically over the past half-century. Although the cooperative division of labor between married couples was a cornerstone of the traditional Inuit economy, a large proportion of households in Kangiqsujuaq today are headed by single women with dependents. Examination of factors associated with marriage at the individual level and of patterns of wage labor participation within households shows that economic cooperation between married or common-law partners is associated with considerable advantages in the mixed cash/subsistence economy, particularly for households where both partners have steady, well-paying jobs. Married households have lower rates of food insecurity and are more invested in traditional harvesting and sharing than the households of unmarried individuals. Despite these benefits, there are significant challenges to forming successful households based on economic cooperation between men and women. The lower economic status of married households with only one primary wage earner, particularly in terms of per capita income, suggests that a domestic partnership may not provide any economic benefit if a prospective spouse or common-law partner is unemployed. In the current context of high unemployment in Kangiqsujuaq, this tradeoff may help explain the high prevalence of unmarried household heads and has important consequences for cultural transmission and mental health in Inuit communities.

scholarly journals Selection, adaptation, inheritance and design in human culture: the view from the Price equation

2020 ◽  
Vol 375 (1797) ◽  
pp. 20190358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Nettle
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Darwinian Evolution ◽  
Price Equation ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Cultural Systems ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Minimal Description ◽  
Cultural Evolutionary ◽  
The Mind

For decades, parts of the literature on human culture have been gripped by an analogy: culture changes in a way that is substantially isomorphic to genetic evolution. This leads to a number of sub-claims: that design-like properties in cultural traditions should be explained in a parallel way to the design-like features of organisms, namely with reference to selection; that culture is a system of inheritance; and that cultural evolutionary processes can produce adaptation in the genetic sense. The Price equation provides a minimal description of any evolutionary system, and a method for identifying the action of selection. As such, it helps clarify some of these claims about culture conceptually. Looking closely through the lens of the Price equation, the differences between genes and culture come into sharp relief. Culture is only a system of inheritance metaphorically, or as an idealization, and the idealization may lead us to overlook causally important features of how cultural influence works. Design-like properties in cultural systems may owe more to transmission biases than to cultural selection. Where culture enhances genetic fitness, it is ambiguous whether what is doing the work is cultural transmission, or just the genetically evolved properties of the mind. I conclude that there are costs to trying to press culture into a template based on Darwinian evolution, even if one broadens the definition of ‘Darwinian’. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Fifty years of the Price equation’.

scholarly journals Spreading the disease: The role of culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioannis Laliotis ◽  
Dimitrios Minos
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Mitigation Measures ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Testing Procedures ◽  
Mobility Data ◽  
Policies And Measures ◽  
High Death

This paper investigates the “cultural” transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.Using West Germany data we observe that in predominantly Catholic regions with stronger social and family ties, the spread and the resulting deaths per capita were much higher compared to non-Catholic ones at the NUTS-3 level. This finding could help explain the rapid spread and high death toll of the virus in some European countries compared to others in the initial stage. Looking at differences within a specific country in a well identified setting eliminates biases due to different social structures, healthcare systems, specific policies and measures, and testing procedures for the virus that can confound estimates and hinder comparability across countries. Further,we use individual level data as well as Apple mobility data to investigate potential mechanisms. The results highlight the cultural dimension of the spread and could suggest the implementation of targeted mitigation measures in light of disease outbreaks

scholarly journals Culture evolves

2011 ◽  
Vol 366 (1567) ◽  
pp. 938-948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Whiten ◽  
Robert A. Hinde ◽  
Kevin N. Laland ◽  
Christopher B. Stringer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Animal Kingdom ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Contrary View ◽  
Ancient Times

Culture pervades human lives and has allowed our species to create niches all around the world and its oceans, in ways quite unlike any other primate. Indeed, our cultural nature appears so distinctive that it is often thought to separate humanity from the rest of nature and the Darwinian forces that shape it. A contrary view arises through the recent discoveries of a diverse range of disciplines, here brought together to illustrate the scope of a burgeoning field of cultural evolution and to facilitate cross-disciplinary fertilization. Each approach emphasizes important linkages between culture and evolutionary biology rather than quarantining one from the other. Recent studies reveal that processes important in cultural transmission are more widespread and significant across the animal kingdom than earlier recognized, with important implications for evolutionary theory. Recent archaeological discoveries have pushed back the origins of human culture to much more ancient times than traditionally thought. These developments suggest previously unidentified continuities between animal and human culture. A third new array of discoveries concerns the later diversification of human cultures, where the operations of Darwinian-like processes are identified, in part, through scientific methods borrowed from biology. Finally, surprising discoveries have been made about the imprint of cultural evolution in the predispositions of human minds for cultural transmission.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document