A leading idea of cultural evolutionary theory is that for human cultures to undergo evolutionary change, cultural transmission must generally serve as a high-fidelity copying process. In analogy to genetic inheritance, the high fidelity of human cultural transmission would act as a safeguard against the transformation and loss of cultural information, thus ensuring both the stability and longevity of cultural traditions. Cultural fidelity would also serve as the key difference-maker between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, explaining why only (...) us humans, with our uniquely high-fidelity transmission capabilities, are capable of evolving and sustaining complex traditions. But what does it mean for cultural transmission to be more or less faithful? This article has two objectives. The first is to clarify the meaning and uses of the concept of cultural fidelity and to evaluate their explanatory import. I argue that cultural evolutionists use several fidelity concepts (episodic, propensity, and generalized fidelity), concepts that I will define and clarify. The second objective is to challenge the explanatory significance of a general notion of fidelity (generalized fidelity) as being both explanatorily meaningful and operationalizable. I conclude that if fidelity is to serve as an explanation of the key differences between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, then the concept will have to be redesigned and rely on different assumptions. 1Introduction 2Generalized Fidelity 2.1The need for an explanatory concept of fidelity 2.2Three conditions for a general notion of cultural fidelity 3Episodic Fidelity 3.1Measuring episodic fidelity 3.2The relevance problem 3.3Explanatory pluralism 3.4The incommensurability of fidelity metrics 4Propensity Fidelity 5Fidelity as an Explanatory Concept 5.1Explaining cultural stability 5.2Explaining human distinctiveness 6Conclusion. (shrink)

The significant theoretical objections that have been raised against memetics have not received adequate defense, even though there is ongoing empirical research in this field. In this paper I identify the key objections to memetics as a viable explanatory tool in studies of cultural evolution. I attempt to defuse these objections by arguing that they fail to show the absence of replication, high-fidelity copying, or lineages in the cultural domain. I further respond to meme critics by arguing that, despite competing (...) explanations of cultural evolution, memetics has unique explanatory power. This is largely founded upon the increasing likelihood of formulating a workable fitness measure for memes, a memetic index. I conclude that memes must be integrated with psychological bias and population-dynamic approaches to cultural evolution. (shrink)

The human species is more reliant on cultural adaptation than any other species, but it is unclear how observational learning can give rise to the faithful transmission of cultural adaptations. One possibility is that teaching facilitates accurate social transmission by narrowing the range of inferences that learners make. However, there is wide disagreement about how to define teaching, and how to interpret the empirical evidence for teaching across cultures and species. In this article I argue that disputes about the nature (...) and prevalence of teaching across human societies and nonhuman animals are based on a number of deep-rooted theoretical differences between fields, as well as on important differences in how teaching is defined. To reconcile these disparate bodies of research, I review the three major approaches to the study of teaching – mentalistic, culture-based, and functionalist – and outline the research questions about teaching that each addresses. I then argue for a new, integrated framework that differentiates between teaching types according to the specific adaptive problems that each type solves, and apply this framework to restructure current empirical evidence on teaching in humans and nonhuman animals. This integrative framework generates novel insights, with broad implications for the study of the evolution of teaching, including the roles of cognitive constraints and cooperative dilemmas in how and when teaching evolves. Finally, I propose an explanation for why some types of teaching are uniquely human, and discuss new directions for research motivated by this framework. (shrink)

Strong reciprocity has recently been subject to heated debate. In this debate, the “West camp” :231–262, 2011), which is critical of the case for SR, and the “Laland camp” :1512–1516, 2011, Biol Philos 28:719–745, 2013), which is sympathetic to the case of SR, seem to take diametrically opposed positions. The West camp criticizes advocates of SR for conflating proximate and ultimate causation. SR is said to be a proximate mechanism that is put forward by its advocates as an ultimate explanation (...) of human cooperation. The West camp thus accuses advocates of SR for not heeding Mayr’s original distinction between ultimate and proximate causation. The Laland camp praises advocates of SR for revising Mayr’s distinction. Advocates of SR are said to replace Mayr’s uni-directional view on the relation between ultimate and proximate causes by the bi-directional one of reciprocal causation. The paper argues that both the West camp and the Laland camp misrepresent what advocates of SR are up to. The West camp is right that SR is a proximate cause of human cooperation. But rather than putting forward SR as an ultimate explanation, as the West camp argues, advocates of SR believe that SR itself is in need of ultimate explanation. Advocates of SR tend to take gene-culture co-evolutionary theory as the correct meta-theoretical framework for advancing ultimate explanations of SR. Appearances notwithstanding, gene-culture coevolutionary theory does not imply Laland et al.’s notion of reciprocal causation. “Reciprocal causation” suggests that proximate and ultimate causes interact simultaneously, while advocates of SR assume that they interact sequentially. I end by arguing that the best way to understand the debate is by disambiguating Mayr’s ultimate-proximate distinction. I propose to reserve “ultimate” and “proximate” for different sorts of explanations, and to use other terms for distinguishing different kinds of causes and different parts of the total causal chain producing behavior. (shrink)

Evolutionary anthropologists and archaeologists have been considerably successful in modelling the cumulative evolution of culture, of technological skills and knowledge in particular. Recently, one of these models has been introduced in the philosophy of science by De Cruz and De Smedt (Philos Stud 157:411–429, 2012), in an attempt to demonstrate that scientists may collectively come to hold more truth-approximating beliefs, despite the cognitive biases which they individually are known to be subject to. Here we identify a major shortcoming in that (...) attempt: De Cruz & De Smedt’s mathematical model makes one particularly strong tractability assumption that causes the model to largely miss its target (namely, truth accumulation in science), and that moreover conflicts with empirical observations. The second, more constructive part of the paper presents an alternative, agent-based model, which allows one to much better examine the conditions for scientific progress and decline. (shrink)

Joseph Henrich and Richard McElreath begin their survey of theories of cultural evolution with a striking historical example. They contrast the fate of the Bourke and Wills expedition — an attempt to explore some of the arid areas of inland Australia — with the routine survival of the local aboriginals in exactly the same area. That expedition ended in failure and death, despite the fact that it was well equipped, and despite the fact that those on the expedition were tough (...) and experienced. For survival in such areas depended on accumulated local knowledge. The locals had learned how detoxify seeds before making bread from them, and how to catch the local fish. Bourke and Wills and their companions lacked this local knowledge, and died as a result (Henrich and McElreath 2003). (shrink)

In this paper I argue, first, that human lifeways depend on cognitive capital that has typically been built over many generations. This process of gradual accumulation produces an adaptive fit between human agents and their environments; an adaptive fit that is the result of hidden‐hand, evolutionary mechanisms. To explain distinctive features of human life, we need to understand how cultures evolve. Second, I distinguish a range of different evolutionary models of culture. Third, I argue that none of meme‐based models, dual (...) inheritance models, nor Boyd and Richerson's models fully succeed in explaining this adaptive fit between agent and the world. I then briefly develop an alternative. Finally, I explore (in a preliminary way) constraints on cultural adaptation. The processes of cultural evolution sometimes built a fit between agents and their environment, but they do not always do so. Why is folk medicine, for example, so much less reliable than folk natural history? (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the adaptive fit between human cultures and their environment is persuasive evidence that some form of evolutionary mechanism has been important in driving human cultural change. I distinguish three mechanisms of cultural evolution: niche construction leading to cultural group selection; the vertical flow of cultural information from parents to their children, and the replication and spread of memes. I further argue that both cultural group selection and the vertical flow of cultural information have been (...) important. More conjecturally, I identify a potential role for meme-based cultural evolution in the explanation of the ‘human revolution’ of the last 100 000 or so years, and defuse an important objection to that explanation. Introduction Cultural groups The cultural invention of adaptive complexes Niche construction models Dual inheritance Memes Memes or minds? Conclusion. (shrink)

We argue that there is a continuum of cases without any demarcation between more individual and more cultural information, and that therefore “culture” should be viewed as a property that human mental representations and practices exhibit to a varying degree rather than as a type or a subclass of these representations and practices (or of “information”). We discuss the relative role of preservative and constructive processes in transmission. We suggest a revision of Richerson and Boyd’s classification of the forces of (...) cultural evloution. (shrink)

Two complementary approaches to a naturalistic theory of culture are, on the one hand, mainstream cultural evolution research, and, on the other, work done under the banners of cultural attraction and the epidemiology of representations. There is much agreement between these two schools of thought, including in particular a commitment to population thinking. Both schools also acknowledge that the propagation of culture is not simply a matter of replication, but rather one of reconstruction. However, the two schools of thought differ (...) on the relative importance of this point. The cultural attraction school believes it to be fundamental to genuinely causal explanations of culture. In contrast, most mainstream cultural evolution thinking abstracts away from it. In this paper I make flesh a simple thought experiment that directly contrasts the effects that replication and reconstruction have on cultural items. Results demonstrate, in a simple and graphic way, that normal cultural propagation is not replicative, but reconstructive, and that these two different modes of propagation afford two qualitatively different explanations of stability. If propagation is replicative, as it is in biology, then stability arises from the fidelity of that replication, and hence an explanation of stability comes from an explanation of how and why this high-fidelity is achieved. If, on the other hand, propagation is reconstructive, then stability arises from the fact that a subclass of cultural types are easily re-producible, while others are not, and hence an explanation of stability comes from a description of what types are easily re-producible, and an explanation of why they are. I discuss two implications of this result for research at the intersection of evolution, cognition, and culture. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In our response to the 27 commentaries, we refine the theoretical claims, clarify several misconceptions of our framework, and explore substantial disagreements. In doing so, we show that our framework accommodates multiple historical scenarios; debate the historical evidence, particularly about “pre-Axial” religions; offer important details about cultural evolutionary theory; clarify the termprosociality;and discuss proximal mechanisms. We review many interesting extensions, amplifications, and qualifications of our approach made by the commentators.

Long before the origins of agriculture human ancestors had expanded across the globe into an immense variety of environments, from Australian deserts to Siberian tundra. Survival in these environments did not principally depend on genetic adaptations, but instead on evolved learning strategies that permitted the assembly of locally adaptive behavioral repertoires. To develop hypotheses about these learning strategies, we have modeled the evolution of learning strategies to assess what conditions and constraints favor which kinds of strategies. To build on prior (...) work, we focus on clarifying how spatial variability, temporal variability, and the number of cultural traits influence the evolution of four types of strategies: (1) individual learning, (2) unbiased social learning, (3) payoff-biased social learning, and (4) conformist transmission. Using a combination of analytic and simulation methods, we show that spatial—but not temporal—variation strongly favors the emergence of conformist transmission. This effect intensifies when migration rates are relatively high and individual learning is costly. We also show that increasing the number of cultural traits above two favors the evolution of conformist transmission, which suggests that the assumption of only two traits in many models has been conservative. We close by discussing how (1) spatial variability represents only one way of introducing the low-level, nonadaptive phenotypic trait variation that so favors conformist transmission, the other obvious way being learning errors, and (2) our findings apply to the evolution of conformist transmission in social interactions. Throughout we emphasize how our models generate empirical predictions suitable for laboratory testing. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (e.g., rhythmic entrainment) and the effects of adaptations for non-musical functions (e.g., auditory scene analysis). How did music evolve? Here, we show that prevailing views on the evolution of music – that music is a byproduct of other evolved faculties, evolved for social bonding, or evolved to signal mate quality – are incomplete or wrong. We argue instead that (...) music evolved as a credible signal in at least two contexts: coalitional interactions and infant care. Specifically, we propose that (1) the production and reception of coordinated, entrained rhythmic displays is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling coalition strength, size, and coordination ability; and (2) the production and reception of infant-directed song is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling parental attention to secondarily altricial infants. These proposals, supported by interdisciplinary evidence, suggest that basic features of music, such as melody and rhythm, result from adaptations in the proper domain of human music. The adaptations provide a foundation for the cultural evolution of music in its actual domain, yielding the diversity of musical forms and musical behaviors found worldwide. (shrink)

The culture of honour hypothesis offers a compelling example of how human psychology differentially adapts to pastoral and horticultural environments. However, there is disagreement over whether this pattern is best explained by a memetic, evolutionary psychological, dual inheritance, or niche construction model. I argue that this disagreement stems from two shortcomings: lack of clarity about the theoretical commitments of these models and inadequate comparative data for testing them. To resolve the first problem, I offer a theoretical framework for deriving competing (...) predictions from each of the four models. In particular, this involves a novel interpretation of the difference between dual inheritance theory and cultural niche construction. I then illustrate a strategy for testing their predictions using data from the Human Relations Area File. Empirical results suggest that the aggressive psychological phenotype typically associated with honour culture is more common among pastoral societies than among horticultural societies. Theoretical considerations suggest that this pattern is best explained as a case of cultural niche construction. (shrink)

Disconcerting findings from nascent sociological research suggest that Western youth are developing subjectivities that reflect neoliberal discursive formations of self-interest, competitiveness, and materialism. However, propositions about: (1) the cognitive-affective mechanisms that explain how youth acquire and reproduce neoliberal ideology, or (2) the dispositions and behaviours that typify a neoliberal subject, remain vague. Therefore, this article provides a novel conceptualization of these two psychosocial facets that can help advance understandings and investigations of the emerging modes and societal consequences of neoliberal subjectification, (...) Specifically, it reviews major theoretical tenets from the respective literatures on neurocognitive development, social cognition, neoliberalism, and neoliberal hegemony. It then synthesizes these tenets within a modified habitus formulation to sketch a testable cognitive-sociological model to explain and explore some of the distinct dispositional values, attitudes, and practices that youth raised in societies with institutionally and culturally prevalent neoliberal norms and discourses potentially may develop and enact. (shrink)

The predictive inadequacy of the social sciences is well documented, and philosophers have sought to diagnose it. This paper examines Brian Epstein’s recent diagnosis. He argues that the social sciences treat the social world as entirely composed of individual people. Instead, social scientists should recognize that material, non-individualistic entities determine the social world, as well. First, I argue that Epstein’s argument both begs the question against his opponents and is not sufficiently charitable. Second, I present doubts that his proposal will (...) improve predictive success for the social sciences, which I support with Edith Penrose’s resource-based theory of the firm. (shrink)

This article argues that evolutionary models based on selection validate, under appropriate conditions, the relevance of optimality as an explanatory mechanism in rational choice theory. The reason is that these frameworks share the mechanism that drives the results, namely, optimization, even if they situate it at different levels. The consequences of our argument are twofold. First, it resolves the tension between those predictions of rational choice theory that are accurate and the evidence showing that individuals seldom optimize. Second, it relativizes (...) the explanatory import of rationality without diminishing the role of optimization as a mechanism. (shrink)

Human cultural life is replete with examples of adaptations to the social, physical, and biological environments that have been built gradually, cumulatively, by hidden-hand mechanisms. The impressive technologies, natural history databases, and exchange networks of traditional peoples have been built in this way. But the ethnological record is also replete with evidence of maladaptive beliefs and practices, and of failures to adapt to changing circumstances. This paper is about such failures. In what ways is cultural evolution constrained, and what explains (...) those constraints? In what ways are those constraints similar to those that affect gene-based evolution; in what ways are they different? In this paper I argue that there are some similar mechanisms of constraint ; there are some differences ; but the major difference results from a division of labor between inheritance systems; the problem of fast change has been offloaded from the genetic to the cultural system. (shrink)

A deflationary perspective on theories of cultural evolution, in particular dual-inheritance theory, has recently been proposed by Lewens. On this ‘pop-culture’ analysis, dual-inheritance theorists apply population thinking to cultural phenomena, without claiming that cultural items evolve by natural selection. This paper argues against this pop-culture analysis of dual-inheritance theory. First, it focuses on recent dual-inheritance models of specific patterns of cultural change. These models exemplify population thinking without a commitment to natural selection of cultural items. There are grounds, however, for (...) doubting the added explanatory value of the models in their disciplinary context—and thus grounds for engaging in other potentially explanatory projects based on dual-inheritance theory. One such project is suggested by advocates of the theory. Some of the motivational narratives that they offer can be interpreted as setting up an adaptationist project with regard to cumulative change in cultural items. We develop this interpretation here. On it, dual-inheritance theory features two interrelated selection processes, one on the level of genetically inherited learning mechanisms, another on the level of the cultural items transmitted through these mechanisms. This interpretation identifies a need for further modelling efforts, but also offers scope for enhancing the explanatory power of dual-inheritance theory. (shrink)

How is word meaning established, and how do individuals acquire it? What ensures the uniform understanding of word meaning in a linguistic community? In this paper I draw from cultural attraction theory and use folk biology as an example domain and address these questions by treating meaning acquisition as an inferential process. I show that significant variation exists in how individuals understand the meaning of inclusive biological labels such as “plant” and “animal” due to variation in their salience in contemporary (...) ethnic minority groups in southwest China, and I present historical textual evidence that the meaning of inclusive terms is often unstable but can be sustained by such cultural institutions as religion and education, which provide situations in which the meaning of linguistic labels can be unambiguously inferred. (shrink)

This paper uses autocatalytic networks to model discontinuous cultural transitions involving cross-domain transfer, using as an illustrative example, artworks inspired by the oldest-known uncontested example of figurative art: the carving of the Hohlenstein-Stadel Löwenmensch, or lion-human. Autocatalytic networks provide a general modeling setting in which nodes are not just passive transmitters of activation; they actively galvanize, or “catalyze” the synthesis of novel nodes from existing ones This makes them uniquely suited to model how new structure grows out of earlier structure, (...) i.e., cumulative, generative network growth. They have been used to model the origin and early evolution of biological life, and the emergence of cognitive structures capable of undergoing cultural evolution. We conducted a study in which six individual creators and one group generated music, prose, poetry, and visual art inspired by the Hohlenstein-Stadel Löwenmensch, and answered questions about the process. The data revealed four through-lines by which they expressed the Löwenmensch in an alternative art form: lion-human hybrid, subtracting from the whole to reveal the form within, deterioration, and waiting to be found with a story to tell. Autocatalytic networks were used to model how these four spontaneously derived through-lines form a cultural lineage from Löwenmensch to artist to audience. We used the resulting data from three creators to model the cross-domain transfer from inspirational source to creative product. These four spontaneously-generated threads of cultural continuity formed the backbone of this Löwenmensch-inspired cultural lineage, enabling culture to evolve even in the face of discontinuity at the level conventional categories or domains. We know of no other theory of cultural evolution that accommodates cross-domain transfer or other forms of discontinuity. The approach paves the way for a broad scientific framework for the origins of evolutionary processes. (shrink)

Autocatalytic networks have been used to model the emergence of self‐organizing structure capable of sustaining life and undergoing biological evolution. Here, we model the emergence of cognitive structure capable of undergoing cultural evolution. Mental representations (MRs) of knowledge and experiences play the role of catalytic molecules, and interactions among them (e.g., the forging of new associations) play the role of reactions and result in representational redescription. The approach tags MRs with their source, that is, whether they were acquired through social (...) learning, individual learning (of pre‐existing information), or creative thought (resulting in the generation of new information). This makes it possible to model how cognitive structure emerges and to trace lineages of cumulative culture step by step. We develop a formal representation of the cultural transition from Oldowan to Acheulean tool technology using Reflexively Autocatalytic and Food set generated (RAF) networks. Unlike more primitive Oldowan stone tools, the Acheulean hand axe required not only the capacity to envision and bring into being something that did not yet exist, but hierarchically structured thought and action, and the generation of new MRs: the concepts EDGING, THINNING, SHAPING, and a meta‐concept, HAND AXE. We show how this constituted a key transition toward the emergence of semantic networks that were self‐organizing, self‐sustaining, and autocatalytic, and we discuss how such networks replicated through social interaction. The model provides a promising approach to unraveling one of the greatest anthropological mysteries: that of why development of the Acheulean hand axe was followed by over a million years of cultural stasis. (shrink)

Several theories, which attempt to give an account of cumulative culture, emphasize the importance of high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms as central to human learning. These high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms are thought to account for the ratchet effect, that is, the capacity to inherit modified or improved knowledge and skills rather than having to develop one's skills from the ground up via individual learning. In this capacity, imitation and teaching have been thought to occupy a special place in the explanation of cumulative culture (...) because they are both thought to function as high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms. In contrast to this standard view, I will argue that imitation and teaching are not both best construed as primarily high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms. Rather, I will argue that though both can contribute to the high‐fidelity transmission of information, imitation and teaching make two distinct contributions to cumulative culture. I will claim that imitation functions primarily as a high‐fidelity transmission mechanism while teaching is primarily responsible for the innovation and creativity characteristic of cumulative culture. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 8, August 2022.

Most attempts to define culture as used in the cultural evolution literature treat culture as a single phenomenon that can be given a single nondisjunctive definition. In this article I argue that, really, cultural evolutionists employ a variety of distinct but closely related concepts of culture. I show how the main prominent attempts to define a culture concept fail to properly capture all the uses of “culture” employed in cultural evolutionary work. I offer a description of some of the most (...) important culture concepts used by cultural evolutionists. (shrink)

In order to explain why cultural traits remain stable despite the error-proneness of social learning, Dan Sperber has proposed that human psychology and ecology lead to cultural traits being transformed in the direction of attractors. This means that simple-minded Darwinian models of cultural evolution are not appropriate. Some scientists and philosophers have been concerned that Sperber’s notion of attractors might show more than this, that attractors destroy subtle cultural variation and prevent adaptive cultural evolutionary processes from occurring. I show that (...) Sperber’s view does not have this consequence—that even if there are attractors, cumulative cultural evolution can still occur. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how to understand the relationship between Cultural Evolutionary Science and the social sciences, given that they coexist and both study cultural change. I argue that CES is best understood as having a unificatory or integrative role between evolutionary biology and the social sciences, and that it is best characterized as a bridge field; I describe the concept of a bridge field and how it relates to other non-reductionist accounts of unification or integration used in (...) the philosophy of science literature. (shrink)

Our ability for scientific reasoning is a byproduct of cognitive faculties that evolved in response to problems related to survival and reproduction. Does this observation increase the epistemic standing of science, or should we treat scientific knowledge with suspicion? The conclusions one draws from applying evolutionary theory to scientific beliefs depend to an important extent on the validity of evolutionary arguments (EAs) or evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs). In this paper we show through an analytical model that cultural transmission of scientific (...) knowledge can lead toward representations that are more truth-approximating or more efficient at solving science-related problems under a broad range of circumstances, even under conditions where human cognitive faculties would be further off the mark than they actually are. (shrink)

The cultural transmission of theological concepts remains an underexplored topic in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). In this paper, I examine whether approaches from CSR, especially the study of content biases in the transmission of beliefs, can help explain the cultural success of some theological concepts. This approach reveals that there is more continuity between theological beliefs and ordinary religious beliefs than CSR authors have hitherto recognized: the cultural transmission of theological concepts is influenced by content biases that also (...) underlie the reception of ordinary religious concepts. (shrink)

Our ability for scientific reasoning is a byproduct of cognitive faculties that evolved in response to problems related to survival and reproduction. Does this observation increase the epistemic standing of science, or should we treat scientific knowledge with suspicion? The conclusions one draws from applying evolutionary theory to scientific beliefs depend to an important extent on the validity of evolutionary arguments (EAs) or evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs). In this paper we show through an analytical model that cultural transmission of scientific (...) knowledge can lead toward representations that are more truth-approximating or more efficient at solving science-related problems under a broad range of circumstances, even under conditions where human cognitive faculties would be further off the mark than they actually are. (shrink)

Henrich and Boyd (2002) were the first to propose a formal model of the role of attraction in cultural evolution. They came to the surprising conclusion that, when both attraction and selection are at work, final outcomes are determined by selection alone. This result is based on a deterministic view of cultural attraction, different from the probabilistic view introduced in Sperber (1996). We defend this probabilistic view, show how to model it, and argue that, when both attraction and selection are (...) at work, both affect final outcomes. (shrink)

Some cultural evolution researchers have argued for the importance of prestige bias as a systematic and widespread social learning bias, that structures human social learning and cultural transmission patterns. Broadly speaking, prestige bias accounts understand it as a bias towards copying ‘prestigious’ individuals. Prestige bias, along with other social learning biases, has been argued to pay a crucial role in allowing cumulative cultural selection to take place, thereby generating adaptations that are key to our success as a species. However, I (...) argue for skepticism about the plausibility and scope of a prestige bias account. I argue that although an account of prestige bias seems plausible or compelling on their face, it is committed to a particular view of the cognition underpinning the bias, and therefore to predictions regarding its flexibility and context-sensitivity. Given this, current empirical evidence gives us reason to doubt the explanatory value of a prestige bias account over a naive, goal-directed agent account. Additionally, the way that prestige is defined in empirical work is in tension with a general understanding of prestige, casting doubt upon its status as evidence of prestige bias. I examine two studies cited as evidence of prestige bias, arguing that in these cases we cannot clearly favour a prestige bias explanation over a goal-directed agent explanation. (shrink)

Concepts from cultural attractor theory are now used in domains far from their original home in anthropology and cultural evolution. Yet these concepts have not been consistently characterised. I here distinguish four ways in which the cultural attractor concept has been used and identify three kinds of factors of attraction typically appealed to. Clarifying these explanatory concepts identifies problems and ambiguities in the work of cultural epidemiologists and commentators alike.

Cultural disparity—the variation across cultural traits such as knowledge, skill, and belief—is a complex phenomenon, studied by a number of researchers with an expanding empirical toolkit. While there is a growing consensus as to the processes that generate cultural variation and change, general explanatory frameworks require additional tools for identifying, organising, and relating the complex causes that underpin the production of cultural disparity. Here I develop a case study in the cognitive science of religion, and demonstrate how concepts and distinctions (...) drawn from work on contrastive explanation and manipulationist accounts of causation provide such tools for distinguishing explanatory levels, organising causal narratives, and accounting for cross-cultural patterns. (shrink)

Morin has written a rich and valuable book. Its main aim is to isolate the factors involved in maintaining behavioural lineages over time, and to understand how these factors might interact. In doing so, it takes issue with the abstract and idealised models and arguments of dual-inheritance theorists, which are alleged in this account to rely on an overly simplistic notion of imitative learning. Morin’s book is full of ethnographic, anthropological, and psychological research, and there is much to commend in (...) it. However, Morin’s arguments against the dual-inheritance theorists are less convincing when put under scrutiny, and his positive picture which includes appeals to ostensive communication, intrinsic appeal and cultural attraction has some difficulties. I argue that when we contrast dual-inheritance theorists and Morin, we find that there may be fewer differences and greater commonalities than Morin’s book might suggest. (shrink)

This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays. Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theoretical frameworks is unclear, and research which engages both of them is largely absent. In this paper we seek to address this (...) gap at the theoretical level, examining the core differences between the two approaches and prospects and conditions for future empirical testing. We clarify the dynamical and mechanistic bases of signalling and CREDs as explanatory models and contrast the previous uses to which they have been put in the human sciences. Because of idiosyncrasies regarding those uses, several commonly supposed differences and comparative advantages are actually misleading and not in fact generalisable. We also show that signalling and CREDs theories as explanatory models are not interchangeable, because of deep structural differences. As we illustrate, the proposed causal networks of each theory are distinct, with important differences in the endogeneity of various phenomena within each model and their explanatory targets. As a result, they can be seen as complementary rather than in competition. We conclude by surveying the current state of the literature and identifying the differential predictions which could underpin more comprehensive empirical comparison in future research. (shrink)

Cultural evolutionary theory has been alternatively compared to a theory of forces, such as Newtonian mechanics, or the kinetic theory of gases. In this article, I clarify the scope and significance of these metatheoretical characterisations. First, I discuss the kinetic analogy, which has been recently put forward by Tim Lewens. According to it, cultural evolutionary theory is grounded on a bottom-up methodology, which highlights the additive effects of social learning biases on the emergence of large-scale cultural phenomena. Lewens supports this (...) claim by arguing that it is a consequence of cultural evolutionists’ widespread commitment to population thinking. While I concur with Lewens that cultural evolutionists often actually conceive cultural change in aggregative terms, I think that the kinetic framework does not properly account for the explanatory import of population-level descriptions in cultural evolutionary theory. Starting from a criticism of Lewens’ interpretation of population thinking, I argue that the explanatory role of such descriptions is best understood within a dynamical framework—that is, a framework according to which cultural evolutionary theory is a theory of forces. After having spelled out the main features of this alternative interpretation, I elucidate in which respects it helps to outline a more accurate characterisation of the overarching structure of cultural evolutionary theory. (shrink)