Darwinian cultural evolution rivals genetic evolution

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Pagel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Genetic Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Human Intentionality

The study of culture from an evolutionary perspective has been slowed by resistance from some quarters of anthropology, a poor appreciation of the fidelity of cultural transmission, and misunderstandings about human intentionality.

scholarly journals Artefacts in cultural transmission: Evolutionary perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Nikolić
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Genetic Transmission ◽  
Principal Characteristics ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Persistence ◽  
Over Time

In this study, the existing body of knowledge related to the mechanisms of cultural evolution is analyzed in view of the role of artefacts in cultural transmission. It is focused primarily on the vertical transmission without inter-personal contact. Particular attention is given to the comparison between unit of culture and artefacts as its material expression, as well as to the studies of analogy between replication in genetic transmission and cultural transmission. It is found that retrieving cultural information from an artefact in absence of original transmitter still shows the principal characteristics of cultural transmission. This type of cultural transmission is of lower fidelity than synchronic transmission with inter-personal contact, since it relies on an artefact as a transmission medium, but can provide for cultural persistence and lay ground for adaptive modifications over time.

Cultural evolution and cultural psychology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Phylogenetic Analyses ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
Human Psychology

Cultural evolution is a branch of the evolutionary sciences which assumes that (i) human cognition and behaviour is shaped not only by genetic inheritance, but also cultural inheritance (also known as social learning), and (ii) this cultural inheritance constitutes a Darwinian evolutionary system that can be analysed and studied using tools borrowed from evolutionary biology. In this chapter I explore the numerous compatibilities between the fields of cultural evolution and cultural psychology, and the potential mutual benefits from their closer alignment. First, understanding the evolutionary context within which human psychology emerged gives added significance to the findings of cultural psychologists, which reinforce the conclusion reached by cultural evolution scholars that humans inhabit a ‘cultural niche’ within which the major means of adaptation to difference environments is cultural, rather than genetic. Hence, we should not be surprised that human psychology shows substantial cross-cultural variation. Second, a focus on cultural transmission pathways, drawing on cultural evolution models and empirical research, can help to explain to the maintenance of, and potential changes in, cultural variation in psychological processes. Evidence from migrants, in particular, points to a mix of vertical, oblique and horizontal cultural transmission that can explain the differential stability of different cultural dimensions. Third, cultural evolutionary methods offer powerful means of testing historical (“macro-evolutionary”) hypotheses put forward by cultural psychologists for the origin of psychological differences. Explanations in terms of means of subsistence, rates of environmental change or pathogen prevalence can be tested using quantitative models and phylogenetic analyses that can be used to reconstruct cultural lineages. Evolutionary considerations also point to potential problems with current cross-country comparisons conducted within cultural psychology, such as the non-independence of data points due to shared cultural history. Finally, I argue that cultural psychology can play a central role in a synthetic evolutionary science of culture, providing valuable links between individual-oriented disciplines such as experimental psychology and neuroscience on the one hand, and society-oriented disciplines such as anthropology, history and sociology on the other, all within an evolutionary framework that provides links to the biological sciences.

scholarly journals How Good Are We At Evaluating Communicated Information?

2021 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 257-272
Author(s):  
Hugo Mercier
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Prior Beliefs ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Large Groups

AbstractAre we gullible? Can we be easily influenced by what others tell us, even if they do not deserve our trust? Many strands of research, from social psychology to cultural evolution suggest that humans are by nature conformist and eager to follow prestigious leaders. By contrast, an evolutionary perspective suggests that humans should be vigilant towards communicated information, so as not to be misled too often. Work in experimental psychology shows that humans are equipped with sophisticated mechanisms that allow them to carefully evaluate communicated information. These open vigilance mechanisms lead us to reject messages that clash with our prior beliefs, unless the source of the message has earned our trust, or provides good arguments, in which case we can adaptively change our minds. These mechanisms make us largely immune to mass persuasion, explaining why propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, and other attempts at persuading large groups nearly always fall in deaf ears. However, some false beliefs manage to spread through communication. I argue that most popular false beliefs are held reflectively, which means that they have little effect on our thoughts and behaviors, and that many false beliefs can be socially beneficial. Accepting such beliefs thus reflects a much weaker failure in our evaluation of communicated information than might at first appear.

Group Selection in the Evolution of Religion: Genetic Evolution or Cultural Evolution?

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 235-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Davis
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Group Selection ◽  
Genetic Group ◽  
Genetic Evolution ◽  
Psychological Traits ◽  
Religious Psychology ◽  
Religious Evolution ◽  
The Relationship

In the scientific literature on religious evolution, two competing theories appeal to group selection to explain the relationship between religious belief and altruism, or costly, prosocial behavior. Both theories agree that group selection plays an important role in cultural evolution, affecting psychological traits that individuals acquire through social learning. They disagree, however, about whether group selection has also played a role in genetic evolution, affecting traits that are inherited genetically. Recently, Jonathan Haidt has defended the most fully developed account based on genetic group selection, and I argue here that problems with this account reveal good reasons to doubt that genetic group selection has played any important role in human evolution at all. Thus, considering the role of group selection in religious evolution is important not just because of what it reveals about religious psychology and religious evolution, but also because of what it reveals about the role of group selection in human evolution more generally.

scholarly journals Digital culture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Acerbi
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Cumulative Culture ◽  
Future Directions

Cultural evolution can provide a useful framework to understand how information is produced, transmitted, and selected in contemporary online, digital, media. The diffusion of digital technologies triggered a radical departure from previous modalities of cultural transmission but, at the same time, general characteristics of human cultural evolution and cognition influence these developments. In this chapter, I will explore some areas where the links between cultural evolution research and digital media seem more promising. As cultural evolution-inspired research on internet phenomena is still in its infancy, these areas represent suggestions and links with works in other disciplines more than reviews of past research in cultural evolution. These include topics such as how to characterise the online effects of social influence and the spread of information; the possibility that digital, online, media could enhance cumulative culture; and the differences between online and offline cultural transmission. In the last section I will consider other possible future directions: the influences of different affordances in different media supporting cultural transmission; the role of producers of cultural traits; and, finally, some considerations on the effects on cultural dynamics of algorithms selecting information.

scholarly journals From storytelling to Facebook. Content biases when retelling or sharing a story

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Acerbi
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Oral Storytelling ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Transmission Chain ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Content Information

Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, where individuals need to understand, memorise, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing— only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (N=1080) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain set-up. The second experiment (N=1200), used the same material, but participants were asked whether they would share or not the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network, or with their friends, in their favourite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and, finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorisation and reproduction are involved in the transmission—like in oral transmission—than when they are not—like in online sharing.

Modeling Social Learning and Culture

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Hoppitt ◽  
Kevin N. Laland
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Model Building ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Reaction Diffusion ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Mathematical Expressions ◽  
Mathematical Techniques ◽  
Neutral Models

This chapter describes a variety of approaches to modeling social learning, cultural evolution, and gene-culture coevolution. The model-building exercise typically starts with a set of assumptions about the key processes to be explored, along with the nature of their relations. These assumptions are then translated into the mathematical expressions that constitute the model. The operation of the model is then investigated, normally using a combination of analytical mathematical techniques and simulation, to determine relevant outcomes, such as the equilibrium states or patterns of change over time. The chapter presents examples of the modeling of cultural transmission and considers parallels between cultural and biological evolution. It then discusses theoretical approaches to social learning and cultural evolution, including population-genetic style models of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution, neutral models and random copying, social foraging theory, spatially explicit models, reaction-diffusion models, agent-based models, and phylogenetic models.

The Dawn of Civilization

2018 ◽  
pp. 234-263
Author(s):  
Kevin N. Laland
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Slow Rate ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Morphological Evolution ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Genetic Evolution ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Adaptive Challenges

This chapter traces the evolution of human civilization from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to the advent of agriculture and its large-scale impacts on the world. It describes this history in three ages of adaptive evolution. First, there was the age in which biological evolution dominated, in which we adapted to the circumstances of life in a manner no different from every other creature. Second came the age when gene–culture coevolution was in the ascendency. Through cultural activities, our ancestors set challenges to which they adapted biologically. In doing so, they released the brake that the relatively slow rate of independent environmental change imposes on other species. The results are higher rates of morphological evolution in humans compared to other mammals, with human genetic evolution reported as accelerating more than a hundredfold over the last 40,000 years. Now we live in the third age, where cultural evolution dominates. Cultural practices provide humanity with adaptive challenges, but these are then solved through further cultural activity, before biological evolution gets moving.

scholarly journals Hunter-gatherer multilevel sociality accelerates cumulative cultural evolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (9) ◽  
pp. eaax5913 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea B. Migliano ◽  
Federico Battiston ◽  
Sylvain Viguier ◽  
Abigail E. Page ◽  
Mark Dyble ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Kinship Networks ◽  
Sensing Technology ◽  
Cultural Differentiation ◽  
Universal Feature ◽  
Functional Relevance ◽  
Cumulative Cultural Evolution

Although multilevel sociality is a universal feature of human social organization, its functional relevance remains unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of multilevel sociality on cumulative cultural evolution by using wireless sensing technology to map inter- and intraband social networks among Agta hunter-gatherers. By simulating the accumulation of cultural innovations over the real Agta multicamp networks, we demonstrate that multilevel sociality accelerates cultural differentiation and cumulative cultural evolution. Our results suggest that hunter-gatherer social structures [based on (i) clustering of families within camps and camps within regions, (ii) cultural transmission within kinship networks, and (iii) high intercamp mobility] may have allowed past and present hunter-gatherers to maintain cumulative cultural adaptation despite low population density, a feature that may have been critical in facilitating the global expansion of Homo sapiens.

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