Abstract

What is it that evolves in cultural evolution? This is a question easily posed but not so easily answered. According to common interpretations of cultural evolutionary theory, it is not strictly agents that change over time or proliferate during cultural transmission, but their socially transmitted behavior, what they communicate or acquire via social learning – in short: their interactions. This means that we have to put these cultural interactions into an evolutionary setting and show how they evolve within cultural populations, i.e. within social networks. But the social networks themselves also evolve, which brings us to a multi-level approach of cultural evolution, implementing both, individual and group selection. In this paper I will assume that the microlevel is given by a description of cultural agents, their behavior and decisions, whereas the macrolevel describes the dynamics on population structure and in particular population boundaries in social networks (since we are not really able to identify something analogous to ‘species’ in cultural evolution). In this paper, I am going to offer a specific mathematical model, that makes use of game theory for representing the cultural microlevel and graph theory for the cultural macrolevel. It has to be shown, how both can formally be linked in a synthetic attempt.