Evolutionary Synthesis in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Culture consists of behavior. The units are practices shared by members of a group and acquired as a result of membership in the group. Although it is common to define the units of culture as abstractions, such as culturgens or memes, these abstractions in no way help to explain a group’s practices. Instead, they only direct research away from the context and consequences that result in transmission of a practice from one group member to another. If culture is to be described as an evolutionary process, one must have a sufficiently general definition of “evolutionary process” to allow genetic evolution and cultural evolution to be examples. This may be accomplished by defining an evolutionary process as composed of variation (within a pool of replicators), transmission (by copying), and selection (by differential transmission). The replicators of cultural evolution are practices, which are units of operant behavior (i.e., behavior under control of consequences and context). Practices are transmitted from individual to individual by imitation and instruction. Instruction may be understood with the concept of a rule, which is a verbal discriminative stimulus (i.e., a verbally created context). Instruction consists of rule-giving, which results in rule-following on the part of the instructee. New rules come into a culture frequently as a result of rule-making, the generation of new rules on the basis of non-social stimuli. Selection in cultural evolution occurs because imitation and instruction of competing practices have differential consequences in the long run, consequences that impact reproductive potential. Since such long-term consequences have little effect on behavior, an adaptive practice (i.e., one that pays in the long run, called “self-control”) is strengthened in the short-term by social reinforcers delivered by rule-givers. A behavioral analysis focuses on environmental events that are observable and, so, susceptible to research. The postulating of fictitious inner entities, whether they be memes, “devices,” or “modules,” only impedes understanding of culture and cultural evolution. Natural selection, because it is short-sighted and opportunistic, may be expected to produce mechanisms that aid and abet valuable behavioral functions. The key to understanding cultural evolution lies in understanding practices in the light of their environmental contexts and short- and long-term consequences.

Charles Darwin changed the course of scientific thinking by showing how evolution accounts for the stunning diversity and biological complexity of life on earth. Recently, there has also been increased interest in the social sciences in how Darwinian theory can explain human culture. Covering a wide range of topics, including fads, public policy, the spread of religion, and herd behavior in markets, Alex Mesoudi shows that human culture is itself an evolutionary process that exhibits the key Darwinian mechanisms of variation, competition, and inheritance. This cross-disciplinary volume focuses on the ways cultural phenomena can be studied scientifically - from theoretical modeling to lab experiments, archaeological fieldwork to ethnographic studies - and shows how apparently disparate methods can complement one another to the mutual benefit of the various social science disciplines. Along the way, this book reveals how new insights arise from looking at culture from an evolutionary angle. Cultural Evolution provides a thought-provoking argument that Darwinian evolutionary theory can both unify different branches of inquiry and enhance understanding of human behavior.

This article was inspired by some works of Belyaev in which he discussed the biosocial human nature, and is dedicated to the 100 year anniversary of Belyaev’ birth. The main views and theories of the human nature and the main paths of genome and culture evolution during anthropogenesis are overviewed. The views of the leading past and present world-wide scientists on the basic principles of the genome-culture interactions are discussed. The seeming contradictions between “geneticists” and “sociologists” are resolved due to the development of the concept of co-evolution of the genome and culture. The evolution of genes and culture is a whole, but not separate processes. During their evolution, humans modify and reconstruct their sociocultural environment. The new environment creates new selection vectors and forms new ways and directions for genetic evolution. In response to the culture development, the genetic determination of human cognitive processes also changed. A good example of the co-evolution of culture and the genome is the development of human speech, the voice and mimic apparatus of communication. The vital importance of the new possibilities for social communication in human populations disposes to the fixation of genetic features that facilitate such communication. At the early stages of human evolution, the areas of the cerebral cortex that were responsible for the development of speech expanded and reorganized. The point of genome-culture co-evolution is well illustrated by niche construction theory. It is emphasized that the evolution of culture, which is widely regarded as a non-biological phenomenon, is quite similar in all its respects to the Darwinian process, as a result of which a sociocultural environment that is adaptive for a given community is formed through selection and transmission in a series of generations. In fact, we are talking about epigenetic inheritance in the evolution of culture and morality. The review details the views and theoretical concepts of geneticists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, behaviorists and ethologists in explaining the phenomenon of human evolution. Some contradictions caused by different rates of evolution of culture and genome are considered. In conclusion, it is shown that Belyaev’s interpretation of the biosocial nature of humans finds confirmation in modern studies by geneticists, sociologists and psychologists.

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city's architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi's Old Quarter (based on 248 photos and 78 data lines), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and small p-values, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then discusses these findings and suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in social sciences in general and for studies of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular.

Developmental systems theory (DST) expands the unit of replication from genes to whole systems of developmental resources, which DST interprets in terms of cycling developmental processes. Expansion seems required by DST's argument against privileging genes in evolutionary and developmental explanations of organic traits. DST and the expanded replicator brook no distinction between biological and cultural evolution. However, by endorsing a single expanded unit of inheritance and leaving the classical molecular notion of gene intact, DST achieves only a nominal reunification of heredity and development. I argue that an alternative conceptualization of inheritance denies the classical opposition of genetics and development while avoiding the singularity inherent in the replicator concept. It also yields a new unit—the reproducer—which genuinely integrates genetic and developmental perspectives. The reproducer concept articulates the non-separability of “genetic” and “developmental” roles in units of heredity, development, and evolution. DST reformulated in terms of reproducers rather than replicators preserves an empirically interesting distinction between cultural and biological evolution.

Cultural evolutionary theory is an interdisciplinary field in which human culture is viewed as a Darwinian process of variation, competition, and inheritance, and the tools, methods, and theories developed by evolutionary biologists to study genetic evolution are adapted to study cultural change. It is argued here that an integration of the theories and findings of mainstream social psychology and of cultural evolutionary theory can be mutually beneficial. Social psychology provides cultural evolution with a set of empirically verified microevolutionary cultural processes, such as conformity, model-based biases, and content biases, that are responsible for specific patterns of cultural change. Cultural evolutionary theory provides social psychology with ultimate explanations for, and an understanding of the population-level consequences of, many social psychological phenomena, such as social learning, conformity, social comparison, and intergroup processes, as well as linking social psychology with other social science disciplines such as cultural anthropology, archaeology, and sociology.

Cultural evolution is an interdisciplinary movement, but some disciplines are not yet well represented. Sociology -- despite sharing many core questions in common -- has hardly engaged with the field of cultural evolution. In this presentation, I briefly consider the reasons why sociologists have been absent from this conversation. Then I outline how sociologists can make a meaningful contribution to cultural evolution research. I argue that sociological research is especially relevant to work on changing beliefs, subcultural differences, cultural mechanisms of stratification, and the role of social networks in cultural change. I conclude by describing some concrete steps I believe will facilitate a greater integration between cultural evolution and sociology in the future.

Sexual dimorphism and cultural evolution in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene of Europe

This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our species offered by Cecilia Heyes in Cognitive Gadgets, Kevin Laland in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, and Michael Tomasello in Becoming Human. Our critical discussion focuses on the authors’ accounts of social learning, and the relationship each hypothesizes between cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary processes. We find that both Laland and Tomasello seek to explain cultural evolution in humans as reliant upon processes of joint attention and shared intentionality (the development of which is largely the focus of Tomasello’s book). Heyes’ account of social learning, in which no particular role is assigned to human intersubjectivity and the same basic associative learning mechanisms of nonsocial learning are also invoked to explain social learning, stands apart. As to the relation of cultural and biological evolution, Laland offers readers a thorough account of the two with detailed analyses of social learning across various non-primate species, and uniquely, among these authors, attends to the influence of genes on social learning. For his part, Tomasello provides readers with a richly detailed experimental accounting of human-unique forms of social learning using Great Apes as points of contrast.

The analogy between biological and cultural evolution is not perfect. Yet, as Mesoudi et al. show, many of the vaunted differences between cultural and genetic evolution (for example, an absence of discrete particles of cultural inheritance, and the blurred distinction between cultural replicators and cultural phenotypes) are, on closer inspection, either illusory or peripheral to the validity of the analogy. But what about horizontal transmission? We strongly agree with the authors that the potential for horizontal transmission of cultural traits does not invalidate an evolutionary approach to culture. We suggest, however, that it does require a different evolutionary treatment.

1. The brain has always played an important role in human evolution, but if brain size alone is the single neural variable considered, we cannot understand either the richness, complexity, or challenges inherent in a theory of human evolution. The brain is not simply a terminal product in mosaic human evolution. 2. Brain size is only one phenotypic “window”, as it were, which allows the investigation of the role of the brain in human evolution. Of equal, if not more importance, are other phenotypic “windows”, on the brain such as its organizational (meaning the quantitative relationships among its parts) and its hierarchical development. This latter aspect refers to the species specific time-course of developmental, maturational, and social interactional and trans-actional patterns that shape the brain through natural selection. 3. One aspect of brain size increase during human evolution relates to the geometric changes that took place in the central cortex. That is, one of the manifestations of increased cell size, decreased neuron density, increased dendritic branching, and increased glial/neural ratios, was an increase in absolute brain size. These aspects, albeit imperfectly, reflect one manifestation of neural complexity. Greater relative brain size, reorganization of cerebral tissues (e.g., the ratio of “association” cortex to primary visual cortex), hemispheric lateralization, and cognitive competence in symbolling and visuo-spatial integration, represent another set of neural evolutionary changes in Homo. 4. While all animals may “learm” and perhaps even have “traditions,” no other being organizes its experiences in arbitrary symbol systems imposed by social groups, where there are non-iconic (arbitrary) relationships between the symbol(s) and referent. The power of this “new” language, integrated with “natural” neural “languages” is enormous, and escalates the complexity of social and material environments to which the human animal attends. Environments can be created through productivity and displacement. Culture is a human domain, if any definition of culture is to have meaning relative to the unique behavioral and cognitive patternings that typify the human being. It is impossible to understand the unique evolutionary past of our species without holistically integrating behavioral (cultural) and neural complexity, and the cognitive basis for both. 5. Stone tool-making patterns from the prehistoric past should be viewed as indices or clues to the totality of complex social behavior in the past, rather than as targets for natural selection in the limited sense of tools as extrasomatic adaptations. Camping, living, manufacturing and butchering sites should be similarly viewed. The challenge is to try to understand these activities as clues to how social experience was organized and transmitted. In this framework, such activities reflect cultural and cognitive complexity and not cultural evolution per se. 6. Prolonged dependency and growth periods must be integrated with the evolutionary changes in neural and cultural complexity. It is at this level that more molecular genetic changes, i.e., regulatory RNA, can be related to the more molar anthropologically-oriented evidence of the evolutionary past. Such changes in growth and dependency were probably dependent upon the development of affectional relationships between the sexes and members of social groups, which minimally increased the duration, if not intensity, of social, cooperative, nurturant relationships. Changes in sexual dimorphism, for example, which can only be inferred, are clues to those social relationships that set brain and behavioral complexity into a mutually-causal and interdependent evolutionary schema. The changes discussed above are the “initial kick” in that schema.

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks 'knowledge synthesis', is poorly supported by 'theory', has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. 'culture', 'social learning', 'cumulative culture') in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous 'grand challenges' emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers.

Culture, as the filter through which people view the world and a key determinant of human behaviour, is central to the practice of natural resource management and conservation. Conservation is intended to moderate the impacts of human cultural modification of the environment, exists as an endeavour because it is culturally valued, and acts largely through policies to encourage or discourage targeted human behaviours. However, culture is not static; as organisms and ecologies evolve, so too does culture exist as a dynamic, interconnected, coevolving element of the social-ecological systems in which management action is situated and implemented. Cultural evolution (CE) offers a valuable theoretical contribution to the scientific understanding of culture, cultural diversity and culture change and has the potential to be harnessed in the applied research and practice of conservation social science. We illustrate the essential principles necessary to grow an applied science of CE for natural resource management and conservation, and identify opportunities for CE to provide valuable information for science-based decision making and help conservation institutions and organizations adapt to the ongoing challenges posed by culture change. This transdisciplinary integration can contribute to improved outcomes across conservation objectives and build more resilient, sustainable social-ecological systems. This article is part of the theme issue 'Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures'.

<titre>R&#233;sum&#233;</titre> Les trois principes centraux de l&#8217;approche darwiniste sont pr&#233;sents dans l&#8217;ouvrage de Nelson et Winter (1982)&#160;: la s&#233;lection, la vari&#233;t&#233; et l&#8217;h&#233;ritage. Ce article s&#8217;interroge sur leur statut&#160;: la mise en &#339;uvre de ces concepts reste-t-elle purement analogique&#160;? Suppose-t-elle au contraire une articulation forte entre &#233;volution sociale et mutation biologique&#160;? Comment expliquer qu&#8217;en d&#233;pit de leurs r&#233;f&#233;rences darwinistes, Nelson et Winter d&#233;crivent leur th&#233;orie comme &#171;&#160;lamarckiste&#160;&#187;&#160;? Cette approche &#171;&#160;lamarckiste&#160;&#187; est mise en relation avec les faiblesses que pr&#233;sentent les d&#233;finitions du concept central de routine chez ces auteurs&#160;: l&#8217;argument d&#233;velopp&#233; ici est que l&#8217;analyse d&#8217;une routine doit mettre l&#8217;accent sur les g&#233;notypes plut&#244;t que sur les comportements et les ph&#233;notypes. Conform&#233;ment &#224; l&#8217;approche d&#233;velopp&#233;e par Winter (1987), on d&#233;fend l&#8217;id&#233;e que l&#8217;utilisation des concepts darwinistes en &#233;conomie s&#8217;appuie sur des principes g&#233;n&#233;raux communs aux syst&#232;mes biologiques et sociaux. Cela permet de consid&#233;rer la routine comme un &#171;&#160;r&#233;plicateur&#160;&#187;&#160;au sens de la litt&#233;rature r&#233;cente consacr&#233;e &#224; l&#8217;&#233;volution culturelle. Cette approche ontologique, inspir&#233;e des principes darwinistes, conduit alors &#224; discuter les m&#233;canismes de r&#233;plication en tant que source de vari&#233;t&#233; et comme processus de s&#233;lection. Classification JEL&#160;: B25, B52, D20, D83