Repeated learning makes cultural evolution unique (original) (raw)

Repeated learning makes cultural evolution unique.pdf

Although genetic information is acquired only once, cultural information can be both abandoned and reacquired during an individual's lifetime. Therefore, cultural evolution will be determined not only by cultural traits' ability to spread but also by how good they are at sticking with an individual; however, the evolutionary consequences of this aspect of culture have not previously been explored. Here we show that repeated learning and multiple characteristics of cultural traits make cultural evolution unique, allowing dynamical phenomena we can recognize as specifically cultural, such as traits that both spread quickly and disappear quickly. Importantly, the analysis of our model also yields a theoretical objection to the popular suggestion that biological and cultural evolution can be understood in similar terms. We find that the possibility to predict long-term cultural evolution by some success index, analogous to biological fitness, depends on whether individuals have few or many opportunities to learn. If learning opportunities are few, we find that the existence of a success index may be logically impossible, rendering notions of "cultural fitness" meaningless. On the other hand, if individuals can learn many times, we find a success index that works, regardless of whether the transmission pattern is vertical, oblique, or horizontal. cultural fitness | diffusion | retention I n this paper, we will address the popular suggestion that biological and cultural evolution can be understood in similar terms (1-8).

Maintenance of prior behaviour can enhance cultural selection

Scientific Reports, 2021

Many cultural phenomena evolve through a Darwinian process whereby adaptive variants are selected and spread at the expense of competing variants. While cultural evolutionary theory emphasises the importance of social learning to this process, experimental studies indicate that people’s dominant response is to maintain their prior behaviour. In addition, while payoff-biased learning is crucial to Darwinian cultural evolution, learner behaviour is not always guided by variant payoffs. Here, we use agent-based modelling to investigate the role of maintenance in Darwinian cultural evolution. We vary the degree to which learner behaviour is payoff-biased (i.e., based on critical evaluation of variant payoffs), and compare three uncritical (non-payoff-biased) strategies that are used alongside payoff-biased learning: copying others, innovating new variants, and maintaining prior variants. In line with previous research, we show that some level of payoff-biased learning is crucial for pop...

The Problem of Adaptive Individual Choice In Cultural Evolution

Biology and Philosophy, 2008

This paper tries to explain how individuals manage adaptive individual choice (i.e. the decision to acquire a fitter than average behavior or idea rapidly and tractably) in cultural evolution, despite the fact that acquiring fitness information is very difficult. I argue that the means of solving this problem suggested in the cultural evolution literature largely are various types of decision rules employing representations of fitness correlated properties or states of affairs. I argue that the problem of adaptive individual choice is best solved where some of these learning rule representations are socially transmitted and some are biologically transmitted.

Biases in cultural transmission shape the turnover of popular traits

The neutral model of cultural evolution, which assumes that copying is unbiased, provides precise predictions regarding frequency distributions of traits and the turnover within a popularity-ranked list. Here we study turnover in ranked lists and identify where the turnover departs from neutral model predictions to detect transmission biases in three different domains: color terms usage in English language 20th century books, popularity of early (1880–1930) and recent (1960–2010) USA baby names, and musical preferences of users of the Web site Last.fm. To help characterize the type of transmission bias, we modify the neutral model to include a content-based bias and two context-based biases (conformity and anti-conformity). How these modified models match real data helps us to infer, from population scale observations, when cultural transmission is biased, and, to some extent, what kind of biases are operating at individual level.

Reasons to be fuzzy about cultural evolution.pdf

This discussion paper responds to two recent articles in Biology and Philosophy that raise similar objections to cultural attraction theory, a research trend in cultural evolution putting special emphasis on the fact that human minds create and transform their culture. Both papers are sympathetic to this idea, yet both also regret a lack of consilience with Boyd, Richerson and Henrich's models of cultural evolution. I explain why cultural attraction theorists propose a different view on three points of concern for our critics. I start by detailing the claim that cultural transmission relies not chiefly on imitation or teaching, but on cognitive mechanisms like argumentation, ostensive communication, or selective trust, whose evolved or habitual function may not be the faithful reproduction of ideas or behaviours. Second, I explain why the distinction between context biases and content biases might not always be the best way to capture the interactions between culture and cognition. Lastly, I show that cultural attraction models cannot be reduced to a model of guided variation, which posits a clear separation between individual and social learning processes. With cultural attraction, the same cognitive mechanisms underlie both innovation and the preservation of traditions.

Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Human cultural traits—behaviors, ideas, and technologies that can be learned from other individuals—can exhibit complex patterns of transmission and evolution, and researchers have developed theoretical models, both verbal and mathematical, to facilitate our understanding of these patterns. Many of the first quantitative models of cultural evolution were modified from existing concepts in theoretical population genetics because cultural evolution has many parallels with, as well as clear differences from, genetic evolution. Furthermore, cultural and genetic evolution can interact with one another and influence both transmission and selection. This interaction requires theoretical treatments of gene–culture coevolution and dual inheritance, in addition to purely cultural evolution. In addition, cultural evolutionary theory is a natural component of studies in demography, human ecology, and many other disciplines. Here, we review the core concepts in cultural evolutionary theory as th...

The adaptive significance of cultural behavior

Human Ecology, 1976

In this article, I argue that human social behavior is a product of the eoevolution of human biology and culture. While critical of attempts by anthropologists to explain cultural practices as if they were independent of the ability of individual human beings to survive and reproduce, I am also leery of attempts by biologists to explain the consistencies between neo-Darwinian theory and cultural behavior as the result of natural selection for that behavior. Instead, I propose that both biological and cultural attributes of human beings result to a large degree from the selective retention of traits that enhance the inclusive fitnesses o f individuals in their environments. Aspects of human biology and culture may be adaptive in the same sense despite differences between the mechanisms of selection and regardless of their relative importance in the evolution of a trait. The old idea that organic and cultural evolution are complementary can thus be used to provide new explanations ]'or why people do what they do.

Five Misunderstandings about Cultural Evolution

Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations; (4) the "cultural fitness" of a mental representation can be inferred from its successful transmission; and (5) selective forces only matter if the sources of variation are random. We close by sketching the outlines of a unified evolutionary science of culture.

Five Clarifications about Cultural Evolution

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2011

This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich et al. (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons that respond to microfeatures. This enables associations to be made, and cultural change to be generated. Second, ‘replicator dynamics’ do not ensure natural selection. The replicator notion does not capture the distinction between actively interpreted self-assembly code and passively copied self-description, which leads to a fundamental principle of natural selection: inherited information is transmitted, whereas acquired information is not. Third, this principle is violated in culture by the ubiquity of acquired change. Moreover, biased transmission is less important to culture than the creative processes by which novelty is generated. Fourth, there is no objective basis for determining cultural fitness. Fifth, the necessity of randomness is discussed. It is con...

Three Roads to Cultural Recurrence

Social scientists have long remarked that there is consistency in what people believe and value over time, especially within definable groups. Anthropologists call this body of information “culture .” There are (at least) three causal mechanisms that can explain the recurrence of cultural traits . Recurrence can occur through (1) strong individual learning biases ; (2) population-level normalizing effects on what is adopted; and (3) replicator-based inheritance . Each of these mechanisms is favored by a particular brand of evolutionary theorizing about human society. Evolutionary psychologists (EPs) advocate the first option, which emphasizes the ability of universal structures in the evolved mind to come up with the same responses to environmental conditions time and again. What explains cultural consistency over time, then, is evolved psychological decision-making processes in the face of common environmental challenges. A group I call “cultural selectionists ” (CSs) prefer the second option, which notes that even poor social learning abilities can still produce consistently shared features at the level of the group if there are widely shared psychological preferences for traits or the types of individuals from whom to acquire culture. The third option, based on replication of the same information from generation to generation, is the memetic position. In this scenario, the cultural features that keep popping up are the phenotypic expressions of memes , or cultural replicators, disseminating through the population via social communication or mediated transmission via information machines such as computer networks. This variety in the possible explanations for cultural evolution is not generally recognized nor do advocates of one position generally acknowledge the validity of others. But I will argue in this chapter that all three of these possibilities are viable in our present state of ignorance about the means through which cultural traits reappear each generation; any one of them may account for a particular aspect of cultural inheritance .