Models and Methods in Cultural and Social Evolution

1981

A fundamental issue in understanding human diversity is whether or not there are regular patterns and processes involved in cultural change. Theoretical and mathematical models of cultural evolution have been developed and are increasingly being used and assessed in empirical analyses. Here, we test the hypothesis that the rates of change of features of human socio-cultural organization are governed by general rules. One prediction of this hypothesis is that different cultural traits will tend to evolve at similar relative rates in different world regions, despite the unique historical backgrounds of groups inhabiting these regions. We used phylogenetic comparative methods and systematic cross-cultural data to assess how different socio-cultural traits changed in (i) island southeast Asia and the Pacific, and (ii) sub-Saharan Africa. The relative rates of change in these two regions are significantly correlated. Furthermore, cultural traits that are more directly related to external environmental conditions evolve more slowly than traits related to social structures. This is consistent with the idea that a form of purifying selection is acting with greater strength on these more environmentally linked traits. These results suggest that despite contingent historical events and the role of humans as active agents in the historical process, culture does indeed evolve in ways that can be predicted from general principles rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org Proc. R. Soc. B 281: 20141622

Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 2014

A fundamental issue in understanding human diversity is whether or not there are regular patterns and processes involved in cultural change. Theoretical and mathematical models of cultural evolution have been developed and are increasingly being used and assessed in empirical analyses. Here, we test the hypothesis that the rates of change of features of human socio-cultural organization are governed by general rules. One prediction of this hypothesis is that different cultural traits will tend to evolve at similar relative rates in different world regions, despite the unique historical backgrounds of groups inhabiting these regions. We used phylogenetic comparative methods and systematic cross-cultural data to assess how different socio-cultural traits changed in (i) island southeast Asia and the Pacific, and (ii) sub-Saharan Africa. The relative rates of change in these two regions are significantly correlated. Furthermore, cultural traits that are more directly related to external...

Human Ecology, 1982

This paper proposes models and examples of five principal modes of interaction between genes and culture in human evolution. Because genes and culture ultimately interact in the minds of individuals, the models are focused on individual-level processes of "constrained microevolution. " The central hypotheses are (1) that cultural evolution as well as genetic evolution commonly proceeds by the differential transmission of alternative "instructions" among individuals, (2) that genetic and cultural processes directly interact through mutual influence on each other's differentials of transmission in a population, (3) that the cultural process is often selfselecting by its own criteria, and (4) that these criteria generally operate to enhance rather than oppose human adaptation. Evolutionary change at higher levels, which is particularly important in sociocultural evolution~ is interpreted as restructuring the nature and extent of the variability available at the individual level. To clarify the conceptual differences of the models and hopefully to stimulate related analyses in other areas, I discuss selected examples of each of these interactions. I conclude with some remarks on the relative importance of the models to human ecology and evolution.

1996

Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2016, 2016

Divergent cumulative cultural evolution occurs when the cultural evolutionary trajectory diverges from the biological evolutionary trajectory. We consider the conditions under which divergent cumulative cultural evolution can occur. We hypothesize that two conditions are necessary. First that genetic and cultural information are stored separately in the agent. Second cultural information must be transferred horizontally between agents of different generations. We implement a model with these properties and show evidence of divergent cultural evolution under both cooperative and competitive selection pressures.

2014

Although the attempt of sociobiology to provide a unied account of human biological and cultural evolution foundered on the sheer plasticity of human behaviour, subsequent attempts to rescue the relevance of evolutionary biology for the study of cultural phenomena have proved fruitful. A—perhaps the—major driver of this success has been the development of dual inheritance models (Boyd and Richerson 1985) that explicitly acknowledge the operation of both genetic and nongenetic inheritance in human sociocultural evolution. The development of such models has come about through, on the one hand, a willingness to apply Darwinian “population thinking” to social and cultural phenomena and, on the other, the recognition that biological genetic evolution is but one specic example of a more general ‘algorithm’ applicable to several domain beyond biology (Hull, 1982; Dennett, 1995).

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2006

We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in "social cognitive neuroscience," although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences.

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource, 2015

Trying to explain the increase in cultural complexity over the long term of human history has long been an interest of anthropology and of historical social sciences more generally. In recent years, interest has grown rapidly in the idea that a key factor in accounting for it might be the size of the human population itself and the extent of interaction between people, because of the effect these have on the innovation rates in populations and on the success with which innovations are transmitted. An important driver of this growth of interest has been the emergence of the new interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution, which makes extensive use of mathematical techniques, especially methods derived from population genetics. The result has been the development of a range of analytical and computer simulation models that make various predictions about the way in which population size influences cultural change, and in particular the growth of cumulative culture, including the processes that have led from the very simple forms of culture possessed by other great apes to those characteristic of Homo sapiens. The aim of this review is to distinguish them, so that future work can focus on evaluating their strengths and weaknesses and the circumstances in which they are useful.

Journal of Social and Biological Systems, 1978

a Human evolution presents special problems for Neo-Darwinian theory because a second system of inheritance, culture, is an important determinant of phenotype in our species. An elementary theory to explain how cultural inheritance affects the evolutionary process is developed from three basic postulates: (1) both genes and culture evolve by natural selection; (2) the reproductive fitness optimum as a function of phenotype is different for genes and culture because the rules of inheritance of the two systems are different; and (3) a genetic capacity for culture is assumed to be optimized by selection with respect to genetic fitness. The theory is formally a twoperson variable sum game in which genes and culture compete to control phenotype, although the conservatively Neo-Darwinian capacity-for-culture assumption ensures that culture will benefit genotype. Simple mathematical models are used to deduce the general properties of equilibrium phenotypes. Results include the possibility that under some circumstances phenotype may be at the cultural rather than the genetic fitness optimum. Particularly if it is assumed that the capacity for culture is a general trait permitting many specific cultural ones, the culture capacity will be like a pleiotropic gene and many cultural traits are likely to be at the cultural optimum. The fact that in a majority of human societies, people bias their kinship behavior in ways unexpected from degree of genetic relatedness may be an example of the effect of selection on culture.

Palgrave Communications, 2019

A widely accepted view in the cultural evolutionary literature is that culture forms a dynamic system of elements (or ‘traits’) linked together by a variety of relationships. Despite this, large families of models within the cultural evolutionary literature tend to represent only a small number of traits, or traits without interrelationships. As such, these models may be unable to capture complex dynamics resulting from multiple interrelated traits. Here we put forward a systems approach to cultural evolutionary research—one that explicitly represents numerous cultural traits and their relationships to one another. Basing our discussion on simple graph-based models, we examine the implications of the systems approach in four domains: (i) the cultural evolution of decision rules (‘filters’) and their influence on the distribution of cultural traits in a population; (ii) the contingency and stochasticity of system trajectories through a structured state space; (iii) how trait interrel...

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2006

It has been claimed that blending processes such as trade and exchange have always been more important in the evolution of cultural similarities and differences among human populations than the branching process of population fissioning. In this paper, we report the results of a novel comparative study designed to shed light on this claim. We fitted the bifurcating tree model that biologists use to represent the relationships of species to 21 biological data sets that have been used to reconstruct the relationships of species and/or higher level taxa and to 21 cultural data sets. We then compared the average fit between the biological data sets and the model with the average fit between the cultural data sets and the model. Given that the biological data sets can be confidently assumed to have been structured by speciation, which is a branching process, our assumption was that, if cultural evolution is dominated by blending processes, the fit between the bifurcating tree model and the cultural data sets should be significantly worse than the fit between the bifurcating tree model and the biological data sets. Conversely, if cultural evolution is dominated by branching processes, the fit between the bifurcating tree model and the cultural data sets should be no worse than the fit between the bifurcating tree model and the biological data sets. We found that the average fit between the cultural data sets and the bifurcating tree model was not significantly different from the fit between the biological data sets and the bifurcating tree model. This indicates that the cultural data sets are not less tree-like than are 1090-5138/06/$ -see front matter D (M. Collard). Evolution and Human Behavior 27 (2006) 169 -184 the biological data sets. As such, our analysis does not support the suggestion that blending processes have always been more important than branching processes in cultural evolution. We conclude from this that, rather than deciding how cultural evolution has proceeded a priori, researchers need to ascertain which model or combination of models is relevant in a particular case and why. D

2020

Cultural evolution theory has long been inspired by evolutionary biology. Conceptual analogies between biological and cultural evolution have led to the adoption of a range of formal theoretical approaches from population dynamics and genetics. However, this has resulted in a research programme with a strong focus on cultural transmission. Here, we contrast biological with cultural evolution, and highlight aspects of cultural evolution that have not received sufficient attention previously. We outline possible implications for evolutionary dynamics and argue that not taking them into account will limit our understanding of cultural systems. We propose twelve key questions for future research, among which are calls to improve our understanding of the combinatorial properties of cultural innovation, and the role of development and life history in cultural dynamics. Finally, we discuss how this vibrant research field can make progress by embracing its multidisciplinary nature.

Baraghith, K. & Feldbacher-Escamilla, C. (forthcoming): Cultural Inheritance in Generalized Darwinism, in: Philosophy of Science

Generalized Darwinism suggests to model cultural development as an evolutionary process where traits evolve through variation, selection, and reproduction. Although this paradigm presupposes some strong similarities between natural and cultural evolution, it also clearly allows for several dissimilarities in the models. One such dissimilarity consists in different forms of inheritance: Whereas in natural evolution inheritance consists of the transmission of discrete units, in the cultural realm it is common to assume that inheritance is a more or less continuous mixing of traits. The latter is sometimes also called blending inheritance. In this paper we characterize blending inheritance in detail. In order to do so we first discuss classical models of cultural evolution and population dynamics (cf. Boyd and Richerson 1988; Mesoudi 2011; Schurz 2011). Then we hint at some problems of these models and introduce our model which combines relevant features of both. Thereby blending inher...