Articulating Babel: An approach to cultural evolution

Phylogenetic trees are a central tool for studying language evolution and have wide implications for understanding cultural evolution as a whole. For example, they have been the basis of studies on the evolution of musical instruments, religious beliefs and political complexity. Bayesian phylogenetic methods are transparent regarding the data and assumptions underlying the inference. One of these assumptions—that languages change independently—is incompatible with the reality of language evolution, particularly with language contact. When speakers interact, languages frequently borrow linguistic traits from each other. Phylogenetic methods ignore this issue, which can lead to errors in the reconstruction. More importantly, they neglect the rich history of language contact. A principled way of integrating language contact in phylogenetic methods is sorely missing. We present contacTrees, a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer for language evolution. The model efficiently infers the phylogenetic tree of a language family and contact events between its clades. The implementation is available as a package for the phylogenetics software BEAST 2. We apply contacTrees in a simulation study and a case study on a subset of well-documented Indo-European languages. The simulation study demonstrates that contacTrees correctly reconstructs the history of a simulated language family, including simulated contact events. Moreover, it shows that ignoring contact can lead to systematic errors in the estimated tree height, rate of change and tree topology, which can be avoided with contacTrees. The case study confirms that contacTrees reconstructs known contact events in the history of Indo-European and finds known loanwords, demonstrating its practical potential. The model has a higher statistical fit to the data than a conventional phylogenetic reconstruction, and the reconstructed tree height is significantly closer to well-attested estimates. Our method closes a long-standing gap between the theoretical and empirical models of cultural evolution. The implications are especially relevant for less documented language families, where our knowledge of past contacts and linguistic borrowings is limited. Since linguistic phylogenies have become the backbone of many studies of cultural evolution, the addition of this integral piece of the puzzle is crucial in the endeavour to understand the history of human culture.

Studies in cultural evolution have uncovered many types of social learning strategies that are adaptive in certain environments. The efficiency of these strategies also depends on the individual characteristics of both the observer and the demonstrator. We investigate the relationship between intelligence and the ways social and individual information is utilised to make decisions in an uncertain environment. We measure fluid intelligence and study experimentally how individuals learn from observing the choices of a demonstrator in a 2-armed bandit problem with changing probabilities of a reward. Participants observe a demonstrator with high or low fluid intelligence. In some treatments they are aware of the intelligence score of the demonstrator and in others they are not. Low fluid intelligence individuals imitate the demonstrator more when her fluid intelligence is known than when it is not. Conversely, individuals with high fluid intelligence adjust their use of social information, as the observed behaviour changes, independently of the knowledge of the intelligence of the demonstrator. We provide evidence that intelligence determines how social and individual information is integrated in order to make choices in a changing uncertain environment.

Over the last three decades, the application of evolutionary theory to the human sciences has shown remarkable growth. This growth has also been characterised by a ‘splitting’ process, with the emergence of distinct sub-disciplines, most notably: Human Behavioural Ecology (HBE), Evolutionary Psychology (EP) and studies of Cultural Evolution (CE). Multiple applications of evolutionary ideas to the human sciences are undoubtedly a good thing, demonstrating the usefulness of this approach to human affairs. Nevertheless, this fracture has been associated with considerable tension, a lack of integration, and sometimes outright conflict between researchers. In recent years however, there have been clear signs of hope that a synthesis of the human evolutionary behavioural sciences is underway. Here, we briefly review the history of the debate, both its theoretical and practical causes; then provide evidence that the field is currently becoming more integrated, as the traditional boundaries between sub-disciplines become blurred. This article constitutes the first paper under the new editorship of the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, which aims to further this integration by explicitly providing a forum for integrated work.

The completion of the HUGO-project will in a dramatic way alter basic research in all areas of biology. The use of the new information will be facilitated by emergence of bioinformatic and technical development for studies of all genes, which are relevant for a biological phenomenon, including the genes which are necessary for expression of complex biological traits such as religion, moral, technology and civilizations. This genetic background has evolved over millions of years, while their expression as complex phenotypes is very recent in an evolutionary perspective. Studies of cultural evolution and its biological background offers a challenge for scholars both in the biological and humanistic fields. The role of the cultural environment as a strong selection force in biological evolution is emphasized.

This volume explores political changes in chiefdoms, specifically how complex chiefdoms emerge and collapse, and how this process - called cycling - can be examined using archaeological, ethnohistoric, paleoclimatic, paleosubsistence and physical anthropological data. The focus for the research is the prehistoric and initial contact-era Mississippian chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States, specifically the societies occupying the Savannah River basin from circa AD 1000 to 1600. This regional focus and the multidisciplinary nature of the investigation provides a solid introduction to the Southeastern Mississippian archaeological record and the study of cultural evolution in general.

A paradigm constitutes a process of reasoning, guidance, and explanation of behavior interacting with the environment and social world. Aspects of the theory of natural selection set the basis for the evolution paradigm and subsequent applications in studies of cultural evolution via materiality in archaeology. The theory of natural selection is important because it provides the tools to set up hypotheses as to why variation in material culture can influence reproductive success as a by-product of human decision-making processes. In this paper, the connections are made between the concept of natural selection and explanatory applications in evolution via natural selection in archaeology and studies of material culture.

The digital revolution in the cultural and creative industries is the factor, which has radically changed the way the audience communicated with the cultural content and organizations. Digital platforms are becoming a more and more significant instrument which cultural organizations utilize in order to connect with more people, become more participatory, such as websites, social media, mobile applications, cultural archives on the Internet. It has been observed that data analytics are a huge source, in this case, to understand the audience behavior, increase the engagement strategy, and evidence-based decision-making. The paper research analyzes how data analytics is used in the engagement and cultural participation of the audience and further offers a comprehensive outline of data analytics that should be used by culture institutions. The first analysis of the paper is the currently existing data-driven models of engagement, including audience analytics frameworks, smart cultural analytics systems, and engagement modeled on the basis of personalization. The elementary limitations and gaps in research will be conducted through comparison analysis to identify gaps in research in the current systems. Based on such findings, a hierarchical data analytics framework can be proposed, which includes many components, including cultural data sources, data collection and data integration module, scalable data storage platform, analytics and machine learning, visualization dashboards, and decision-making operations. The proposed framework can enable cultural institutions to accumulate, process, and analyze the audience data on different online platforms to generate meaningful insights into the audience preferences and activity patterns. Evaluation and key performance indicators measurements are also provided to show whether the given framework was successful in improving the outcomes of cultural participation and engagement. The results prove that data-driven cultural analytics has the potential to enhance audience engagement, strategy-oriented approaches to cultural decisions significantly, and the sustainability of cultural organizations. The other implementation challenges are also discussed in the study and the future research directions are outlined as applying artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, immersive technologies, and smart cultural ecosystems

Culture pervades human life and is at the origin of the success of our species. A wide range of other animals have culture too, but often in a limited form that does not complexify through the gradual accumulation of innovations. We developed a new paradigm to study cultural evolution in primates in order to better evaluate our closest relatives' cultural capacities. Previous studies using transmission chain experimental paradigms, in which the behavioural output of one individual becomes the target behaviour for the next individual in the chain, show that cultural transmission can lead to the progressive emergence of systematically structured behaviours in humans. Inspired by this work, we combined a pattern reproduction task on touch screens with an iterated learning procedure to develop transmission chains of baboons (Papio papio). Using this procedure, we show that baboons can exhibit three fundamental aspects of human cultural evolution: a progressive increase in performance, the emergence of systematic structure and the presence of lineage specificity. Our results shed new light on human uniqueness: we share with our closest relatives essential capacities to produce human-like cultural evolution.

Inferences from dependencies in development, or from conserved traits, structures, or genes, have become a central and ubiquitous tool in evolutionary developmental biology. An element with many downstream consequences of its operation in an adaptive system should be conserved because its deletion or change would likely have massively deleterious effects. Thus, substantial observed dependencies should predict conservation, and vice versa. Dependencies and conservation are both matters of degree, generating an ordering of rates of evolutionary change. I trace four independent sources for this idea with subtle differences in their application. The origins of the use of genetic pleiotropy to predict conservation is complex and progressed in multiple stages, with partial awareness emerging in the 1960s, and grew erratically in use without becoming a major theme until the 1990s. Since 2000 it has grown to become an essential tool and applied in an expanding number of ways. I distinguish and illustrate “top-down” and “bottom up” approaches, though people now working from one direction often recruit collaborators from the other. Other approaches have had diverse inspirations and points of initial application. Rupert Riedl’s notion of “burden” was applied primarily to morphological traits, with an elaborated account of organizational factors modulating entrenchment. Wallace Arthur explored dependency in “morphogenetic trees,” utilizing as his inspiration cellular descent trees in metazoans. Bill Wimsatt looked for “generative entrenchment” in factors both internal and external to the developing system to analyze innate behavior. Entrenchment was later extended to analyze development in Drosophila and to construct multi-locus population genetic models of gene control networks, yielding new results that illuminate relations between micro and meso-evolution. Applications of generative entrenchment to cultural and technological evolution are also sketched, where development of individuals and other social entities must play a central role.

This ethnographic study examines Royal Boat Song (He Ruea Luang) cultural transmission as empirical evidence for evolutionary approaches to imaginative culture. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Phitsanulok Province, Thailand (2024-2025), we analyzed how this elite court tradition successfully adapted from royal water processions to community Buddhist merit-making ceremonies while maintaining core musical and ceremonial elements. Our findings demonstrate cultural transmission mechanisms predicted by evolutionary theory: selective retention of adaptive features including four-section musical structure, specialized vocal techniques, and ceremonial significance, combined with contextual modifications serving contemporary community needs through localized poetic content, Buddhist ceremonial integration, and riverbank performance venues. The research reveals how Royal Boat Songs function as adaptive cultural inheritance systems, facilitating group bonding, cultural memory preservation, and religious expression while evolving through community agency. Results show high-fidelity transmission of core musical structures with systematic adaptive variation in textual content, supporting cultural attraction theory predictions about cognitive constraints in cultural evolution. This case study provides empirical support for theories positioning imaginative culture as arising from human nature's evolved capacities for social cooperation, meaning-making, and collective identity formation, while demonstrating that cultural preservation occurs through adaptive evolution rather than static maintenance.

Cultural evolution of cooperation: The interplay between forms of social learning and group selection

In cultural transmission, information flows from ‘producers’ to ‘receivers’. Transmission biases such as content-, model- and frequency-based biases, which modulate the adoption of cultural traits by receivers, have been explored in depth. We focus instead on a bias on production and compare transmission fidelity when producers either intend to teach or intend to reproduce socially acquired information. Eighty participants were asked to read a story and reproduce it either in order to ‘teach it to someone else’ or just ‘recall it as accurately as possible’. In order to test whether differences in fidelity between these two tasks were related to information encoding (during reading) or to reproduction, we also manipulated the timing of instructions: Half of the participants were informed of the task (Teach or Recall) Before reding the story and the other half, After reading the story. Participants were arranged in 20 transmission chains of 4 generations. The first generation in each chain read a text about the environment (from Mesoudi et al., 2006), and subsequent generations read the previous participant’s output story. We measured two aspect of fidelity: Quantity and Accuracy of information retained over generations. We found that being informed of the task Before reading the story led to higher Accuracy and Quantity than being informed After reading. Surprisingly, Teaching yielded lower Accuracy than Recall, but both resulted in similar Quantity retained. Additional analyses revealed differences in the content of the information under Teaching and Recall. We conclude that aspects of cultural transmission pertaining to production, in particular, intention to teach vs reproduce, influence transmission dynamics and therefore need to be integrated in models of cultural evolution. Reference Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Dunbar, R. (2006). A bias for social information in human cultural transmission. British Journal of Psychology, 97(3), 405–423.

Early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has focused on differentiating children with ASD from neurotypical children. However, many children presenting with concern for ASD are ultimately diagnosed with language disorder (LD). This study aimed to identify differences in parent-rated development and behavior among children ages 2 to 5 years presenting with concern for ASD who were diagnosed with either ASD or LD. Children with ASD were rated as more socially withdrawn and more delayed in social development and self-help skills than those with LD. Parent-rated developmental delays were positively correlated with scores on an autism screening measure and with social withdrawal and pervasive developmental problems among children with ASD. Among those with LD, parent-rated social and self-help development were positively correlated with social withdrawal and attention problems. Thus, parent ratings of social withdrawal and development of social and self-help skills may facilitate differential diagnosis of ASD and LD in children ages 2 to 5 years.

Supportive parenting and social and behavioral development: Does classroom emotional support moderate?

Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Johns Hopkins, 2012) xi + 315 $65.00 Nancy Easterlin is an important voice in the emerging dialogue about evolutionary theory and cognitive brain science and their relevance to the study and interpretation of literature. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation is major contribution to that dialogue; in fact, Easterlin sets out new that will prove important to readers and writers who believe that Darwinian science has great deal to offer the understanding of literary texts, their origins and effects. Easterlin's work lies at the intersection between materialist critiques of nature--evolutionary, cognitive, ecological--and the theoretical approach to literary works. Among the goals: to achieve new and useful mode of reading. Easterlin begins by proposing utility as key to literary value, and she notes that literature is a thing made for human use, like an airplane or soup pot or belt (ix). Her focus, she continues, is not on the quantitative research championed by some Darwinian but rather on the idea that and cultural evolution together highlight the centrality of meaning-making processes for our species and, by extension, provide ample justification for interpretation as the core aim of our discipline (6). This claim is fairly grand, but Easterlin sets out her terms and her methods in way that justifies the foundational--and fundamental--elements of her argument: Whether the arts evolved primarily out of metaphysical needs, or within the overlapping activities of ritual and play, the message seems fairly clear as we look to the anthropological record: in the line connecting human prehistory and human history the arts exhibit enduring importance (33). For Easterlin, critics need to read as aesthetically and rhetorically attuned scholars of the works they know and care about, but they also need to interpret these works with recognition of their biological and cultural embeddedness. Literature and the arts are important, Easterlin maintains, because they represent crucial and often repeated outgrowth of certain evolutionary developments within the species, and because they help people link central aspects of their lived experience that are not always clearly connected. In this regard, Easterlin's goal is not to give a model that can be [slapped] down onto unsuspecting texts; instead, her goal is to offer creative enterprise, flexible and dynamic criticism that is rational and judicious in Matthew Arnold's sense while never forgetting the awe or love of beauty that draws us to art and maybe even toward the sciences that some of us want to use to help elucidate (38). In this regard, literary interpretation is about patience, and feeling and love, not just about knowing, and deciphering, and comprehending. Dulce et utile, Horace said, but the sweet can often be useful, and the useful can often be ever so sweet. Trying to understand these texts is not easy; Easterlin refers to the biologist E. O. Wilson's important claim about complexity: Biology is almost unimaginably more complex than physics, and the arts equivalently more complex than (Consilience 67). Such sweeping claim should not intimidate literary critics, however; it is reminder how much valuable work remains to be done. After defining what biocultural criticism might look like, Easterlin applies her perspective to new historical version of narrative, aesthetics, and ideology, to cognitive and place-based version of ecocriticism, to cognitive science as mental ecology, and to an evolutionary-feminist reading of sex, mating and power. This structure accounts for part of the richness and complexity of A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. By applying her approach to number of different modes and methods of reading, she creates sense of how central her culture + biology (her Darwin + society) approach is to the practices in which literary critics are already engaged. …