A theory of supply-driven evolution for cultural evolution

2013 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-98
Author(s):  
Julian Z. Xue
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Selection Of

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.

The rise and fall of Homo sapiens sapiens

1989 ◽  
Vol 325 (1228) ◽  
pp. 479-488 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Food ◽  
The World ◽  
Present Rate

Human beings have broken the ecological ‘law’ that says that big, predatory animals are rare. Two crucial innovations in particular have enabled us to alter the planet to suit ourselves and thus permit unparalleled expansion: speech (which implies instant transmission of an open-ended range of conscious thoughts) and agriculture (which causes the world to produce more human food than unaided nature would do). However, natural selection has not equipped us with a long-term sense of self-preservation. Our population cannot continue to expand at its present rate for much longer, and the examples of many other species suggests that expansion can end in catastrophic collapse. Survival beyond the next century in a tolerable state seems most unlikely unless all religions and economies begin to take account of the facts of biology. This, if it occurred, would be a step in cultural evolution that would compare in import with the birth of agriculture.

scholarly journals Stability-based sorting: The forgotten process behind (not only) biological evolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaroslav Flegr ◽  
Jan Toman
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Static Stability ◽  
Main Process ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Broad Distribution ◽  
Evolutionary Consequences ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractNatural selection is considered to be the main process that drives biological evolution. It requires selected entities to originate dependent upon one another by the means of reproduction or copying, and for the progeny to inherit the qualities of their ancestors. However, natural selection is a manifestation of a more general persistence principle, whose temporal consequences we propose to name “stability-based sorting” (SBS). Sorting based on static stability, i.e., SBS in its strict sense and usual conception, favours characters that increase the persistence of their holders and act on all material and immaterial entities. Sorted entities could originate independently from each other, are not required to propagate and need not exhibit heredity. Natural selection is a specific form of SBS—sorting based on dynamic stability. It requires some form of heredity and is based on competition for the largest difference between the speed of generating its own copies and their expiration. SBS in its strict sense and selection thus have markedly different evolutionary consequences that are stressed in this paper. In contrast to selection, which is opportunistic, SBS is able to accumulate even momentarily detrimental characters that are advantageous for the long-term persistence of sorted entities. However, it lacks the amplification effect based on the preferential propagation of holders of advantageous characters. Thus, it works slower than selection and normally is unable to create complex adaptations. From a long-term perspective, SBS is a decisive force in evolution—especially macroevolution. SBS offers a new explanation for numerous evolutionary phenomena, including broad distribution and persistence of sexuality, altruistic behaviour, horizontal gene transfer, patterns of evolutionary stasis, planetary homeostasis, increasing ecosystem resistance to disturbances, and the universal decline of disparity in the evolution of metazoan lineages. SBS acts on all levels in all biotic and abiotic systems. It could be the only truly universal evolutionary process, and an explanatory framework based on SBS could provide new insight into the evolution of complex abiotic and biotic systems.

scholarly journals Pragmatics and Language Evolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marieke Woensdregt ◽  
Kenny Smith
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Capacity ◽  
Food Sources ◽  
Evolutionary Mechanisms

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that deals with language use in context. It looks at the meaning linguistic utterances can have beyond their literal meaning (implicature), and also at presupposition and turn taking in conversation. Thus, pragmatics lies on the interface between language and social cognition. From the point of view of both speaker and listener, doing pragmatics requires reasoning about the minds of others. For instance, a speaker has to think about what knowledge they share with the listener to choose what information to explicitly encode in their utterance and what to leave implicit. A listener has to make inferences about what the speaker meant based on the context, their knowledge about the speaker, and their knowledge of general conventions in language use. This ability to reason about the minds of others (usually referred to as “mindreading” or “theory of mind”) is a cognitive capacity that is uniquely developed in humans compared to other animals. What we know about how pragmatics (and the underlying ability to make inferences about the minds of others) has evolved. Biological evolution and cultural evolution are the two main processes that can lead to the development of a complex behavior over generations, and we can explore to what extent they account for what we know about pragmatics. In biological evolution, changes happen as a result of natural selection on genetically transmitted traits. In cultural evolution on the other hand, selection happens on skills that are transmitted through social learning. Many hypotheses have been put forward about the role that natural selection may have played in the evolution of social and communicative skills in humans (for example, as a result of changes in food sources, foraging strategy, or group size). The role of social learning and cumulative culture, however, has been often overlooked. This omission is particularly striking in the case of pragmatics, as language itself is a prime example of a culturally transmitted skill, and there is solid evidence that the pragmatic capacities that are so central to language use may themselves be partially shaped by social learning. In light of empirical findings from comparative, developmental, and experimental research, we can consider the potential contributions of both biological and cultural evolutionary mechanisms to the evolution of pragmatics. The dynamics of types of evolutionary processes can also be explored using experiments and computational models.

scholarly journals World-System and Evolution: An Appraisal

1996 ◽  
pp. 201-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas D. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
World System ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Exchange Networks ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Intersocietal Interaction

This paper makes six arguments. First, socio-cultural evolution must be studied from a "world-system" or intersocietal interaction perspective. A focus on change in individual "societies" or "groups" fails to attend adequately to the effects of intersocietal interaction on social and cultural change. Second, in order to be useful, theories of the modern world-system must be modified extensively to deal with non-capitalist settings. In particular, changes in system boundaries marked by exchange networks (for information, luxury or prestige goods, political/military interactions, and bulk goods) seldom coincide,and follow different patterns of change. Third, all such systems tend to pulsate, that is, expand and contract, or at least expand rapidly and less rapidly. Fourth, once hierarchical forms of social organization develop such systems typically have cycles of rise and fall in the relative positions of constituent politics. Fifth, expansion of world-systems forms and transforms social relations in newly incorporated areas. While complex in the modern world-system, these changes are even more complex in precapitalist settings. Sixth, thesetwo cycles combine with demographic and epidemiological processes to shape long -term socio-cultural evolution.

Cultural evolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Mameli ◽  
Kim Sterelny
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Phenotypic Traits ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Cumulative Change ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

Cultural traits are those phenotypic traits whose development depends on social learning. These include practices, skills, beliefs, desires, values, and artefacts. The distribution of cultural traits in the human species changes over time. But this is not enough to show that culture evolves. That depends on the mechanisms of change. In the cultural realm, one can often observe something similar to biology’s ‘descent with modification’: cultural traits are sometimes modified, their modifications are sometimes retained and passed on to others through social learning, until new modifications are added. In this way, new modifications are piled on top of old modifications, generating cumulative change. But, again, this is not enough to show that culture evolves. For culture to evolve, cumulative change must be the result of hidden-hand mechanisms similar to those that explain cumulative biological change. If cumulative cultural change cannot be explained in these terms, the analogy between cultural change and biological evolution is unhelpful. The best-known biological mechanism is natural selection. There are reasons to think that cultural change is at least sometimes due to natural-selection-like mechanisms. The adaptive fit often found between cultural traits and the environment in many cases has been built gradually and in a way that involves natural selection operating at the cultural level. The parallel with morphological adaptation is compelling. No complete and universally accepted account of natural-selection-like processes operating at the cultural level exists at this stage. But at least three kinds of processes seem possible: - A natural-selection-like process can be generated by culturally heritable differences in fitness between individuals. - A natural-selection-like process can be generated by culturally heritable differences in fitness between groups. - A natural-selection-like process can operate at the level of cultural variants themselves, independently of the effects that cultural variants have on the fitness of individuals or groups. The theory of memes (initially presented by Dawkins and then developed by Dennett) is one possible account of how (iii) might work; but other accounts exist too.

scholarly journals The Many Facets of Evolutionary Dynamics

1997 ◽  
Vol 05 (03) ◽  
pp. 325-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odo Diekmann
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Mathematical Description ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Many

In this note we present an outsider's view on the mathematical description of long term biological evolution as driven by natural selection. It is an outlook to the future, more than an account of what has been achieved so far.

CHARTING CULTURAL VARIATION IN CHIMPANZEES

Behaviour ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 138 (11-12) ◽  
pp. 1481-1516 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.E.G. Tutin ◽  
W.C. McGrew ◽  
R.W. Wrangham ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Frequency Of Occurrence ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Term Study ◽  
Long Term Study ◽  
Form Function ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Study Sites

AbstractCultural variation among chimpanzee communities or unit-groups at nine long-term study sites was charted through a systematic, collaborative procedure in which the directors of the sites first agreed a candidate list of 65 behaviour patterns (here fully defined), then classified each pattern in relation to its local frequency of occurrence. Thirty-nine of the candidate behaviour patterns were discriminated as cultural variants, sufficiently frequent at one or more sites to be consistent with social transmission, yet absent at one or more others where environmental explanations were rejected. Each community exhibited a unique and substantial profile of such variants, far exceeding cultural variation reported before for any other non-human species. Evaluation of these pan-African distributions against three models for the diffusion of traditions identified multiple cases consistent with cultural evolution involving differentiation in form, function and targets of behaviour patterns.

Does culture evolve by means of Darwinian selection? The lessons of Candide’s travels

2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique Guillo
Keyword(s):  
Population Genetics ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Darwinian Selection ◽  
Universal Algorithm ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Biological Phenomena

The meaning of the concept of natural selection undergoes important changes when it circulates, through the use of analogies, between the realms of biological and cultural phenomena. These changes are not easily detected, but they are unavoidable. They have to do with differences between the properties of cultural phenomena and those of biological phenomena: in particular, the absence of the equivalent of a Hardy–Weinberg law for culture. These differences make it necessary to translate the concepts of classic population genetics into the language of transmission. This translation enables the theorists discussed here to build a unitary general theory of evolution (GTE) based on analogies between biological and cultural evolution, and at the same time to single out their differences. But the unity and the rigor of this theoretical approach are merely apparent. The concept of selection as it is defined here loses, in its three spheres of application – GTE, culture but also biology – the meaning and explanatory power it has in classic population genetics. This means that the mechanism of Darwinian selection cannot be considered as a universal algorithm that is valid for both biological and cultural phenomena alike.

Cultural Evolution

Anthropology ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Genetic Evolution

“Cultural evolution” is the idea that human cultural change––that is, changes in socially transmitted beliefs, knowledge, customs, skills, attitudes, languages, and so on––can be described as a Darwinian evolutionary process that is similar in key respects (but not identical) to biological/genetic evolution. More specifically, just as Darwin described biological/genetic evolution as comprising three key components––variation, competition (or selection), and inheritance––cultural change also comprises these same phenomena. Yet while cultural evolution can be described as Darwinian in this sense, the details of the processes (e.g., how variation is generated, or how information is transmitted) are likely to be different in the cultural case compared to the details of biological/genetic evolution. Bearing these differences in mind, cultural evolution researchers have taken many of the same methods, tools, and concepts that biologists have developed to explain biological diversity and complexity and used them to explain similar diversity and complexity in cultural systems. These include phylogenetic methods to reconstruct “macroevolutionary” historical relations between cultural traits (e.g., languages or tools), ethnographic field studies to document and explain contemporary cross-cultural variation, laboratory experiments to determine the small-scale details of cultural “microevolution” (e.g., how cognitive biases favor certain ideas over others or whether we preferentially learn from certain people within a group), and mathematical models to explore the long-term and population-level consequences of those microevolutionary processes. Given this interdisciplinary breadth, it has been suggested that evolutionary theory may serve as a synthetic framework for unifying the social sciences, just as evolutionary theory synthesized the biological sciences during the early 20th century.

Female and male song exhibit both parallel and divergent patterns of cultural evolution: A long-term study of song structure and diversity in tropical wrens

The Auk ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan A Graham ◽  
Daniel D Heath ◽  
Daniel J Mennill
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Term Study ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Long Term Study ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
Song Types ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Animal culture changes over time through processes that include drift, immigration, selection, and innovation. Cultural change has been particularly well-studied for animal vocalizations, especially for the vocalizations of male animals in the temperate zone. Here we examine the cultural change in the vocalizations of tropical Rufous-and-white Wrens (Thryophilus rufalbus), quantifying temporal variation in song structure, song type diversity, and population-level distribution of song types in both males and females. We use data from 10 microsatellite loci to quantify patterns of immigration and neutral genetic differentiation over time, to investigate whether cultural diversity changes with rates of immigration. Based on 11 yr of data, we show that the spectro-temporal features of several widely-used persistent song types maintain a relatively high level of consistency for both males and females, whereas the distribution and frequency of particular song types change over time for both sexes. Males and females exhibit comparable levels of cultural diversity (i.e. the diversity of song types across the population), although females exhibit greater rates of cultural change over time. We found that female changes in cultural diversity increased when immigration is high, whereas male cultural diversity did not change with immigration. Our study is the first long-term study to explore cultural evolution for both male and female birds and suggests that cultural patterns exhibit notable differences between the sexes.

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