How to create a cultural species: Evaluating three proposals

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.

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.

Acquisition of a socially learned tool use sequence in chimpanzees: Implications for cumulative culture.

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.

I propose a mathematical model of cultural evolution to explain why false theories and meaning systems or maladaptive beliefs may spread and become fixed in a population while assuming that their diffusion rates are lower than their true counterparts. By combining ideas from judgment aggregation and the Condorcet Jury theorem with cultural evolution dynamics, I introduce a new epistemic stage in the cultural evolution process where culturally transmitted theories not only spread “horizontally” (across individuals in the same generation) and “vertically” (from one generation to the next), but also inside individual brains (“personal reflection process”). This occurs when a brain adopts a maladaptive theory (not received from outside) by means of internal inference from other false premise/idea that was indeed received culturally. In this context, false theories may favor the assumption of other false theories after the individuals have been exposed to true information about their logical connection, and increase their presence in the population within the normal and adaptive logical working of our brains. Using a simple stylized model and subsequent simulations I identify the parametric conditions in which false theories become universally accepted, so that the model could be tested empirically.

After documenting Tarde’s neglect and placing him in the 19th-century sociological context, this paper argues that his concept of “imitation” was important because social learning (writ small) or culture (writ large), a non-genetic form of heredity, means that a distinct cultural evolutionary process including variation and selection resulting in descent with modification is inevitable. Beginning in the last half of the 20th century there was a flowering of theorizing and research about cultural evolution across the humanities and social sciences and eventually about culture in general in sociology. Unfortunately, what should have been recognized as Tarde’s role as a forefather of these has only occasionally been recognized.

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.

Cognitive Mapping and the Origin of Language and Mind

Cumulative cultural change requires organisms that are capable of both exploratory individual learning and faithful social learning. In our model, an organism's phenotype is initially determined innately (by its genotypic value) or by social learning (copying a phenotype from the parental generation), and then may or may not be modified by individual learning (exploration around the initial phenotype). The environment alternates periodically between two states, each defined as a certain range of phenotypes that can survive. These states may overlap, in which case the same phenotype can survive in both states, or they may not. We find that a joint social and exploratory individual learning strategy-the strategy that supports cumulative culture-is likely to spread when the environmental states do not overlap. In particular, when the environmental states are contiguous and mutation is allowed among the genotypic values, this strategy will spread in either moderately or highly stable environments, depending on the exact nature of the individual learning applied. On the other hand, natural selection often favors a social learning strategy without exploration when the environmental states overlap. We find only partial support for the "consensus" view, which holds that individual learning, social learning, and innate determination of behavior will evolve at short, intermediate, and long environmental periodicities, respectively.

There has been relatively little research on the psychological mechanisms of social learning. This may be due, in part, to the practice of distinguishing categories of social learning in relation to ill-defined mechanisms (Davis, 1973; Galef, 1988). This practice both makes it difficult to identify empirically examples of different types of social learning, and gives the false impression that the mechanisms responsible for social learning are clearly understood. It has been proposed that social learning phenomena be subsumed within the categorization scheme currently used by investigators of asocial learning. This scheme distinguishes categories of learning according to observable conditions, namely, the type of experience that gives rise to a change in an animal (single stimulus vs. stimulus-stimulus relationship vs. response-reinforcer relationship), and the type of behaviour in which this change is detected (response evocation vs. learnability) (Rescorla, 1988). Specifically, three alignments have been proposed: (i) stimulus enhancement with single stimulus learning, (ii) observational conditioning with stimulus-stimulus learning, or Pavlovian conditioning, and (iii) observational learning with response-reinforcer learning, or instrumental conditioning. If, as the proposed alignments suggest, the conditions of social and asocial learning are the same, there is some reason to believe that the mechanisms underlying the two sets of phenomena are also the same. This is so if one makes the relatively uncontroversial assumption that phenomena which occur under similar conditions tend to be controlled by similar mechanisms. However, the proposed alignments are intended to be a set of hypotheses, rather than conclusions, about the mechanisms of social learning; as a basis for further research in which animal learning theory is applied to social learning. A concerted attempt to apply animal learning theory to social learning, to find out whether the same mechanisms are responsible for social and asocial learning, could lead both to refinements of the general theory, and to a better understanding of the mechanisms of social learning. There are precedents for these positive developments in research applying animal learning theory to food aversion learning (e.g. Domjan, 1983; Rozin & Schull, 1988) and imprinting (e.g. Bolhuis, de Vox & Kruit, 1990; Hollis, ten Cate & Bateson, 1991). Like social learning, these phenomena almost certainly play distinctive roles in the antogeny of adaptive behaviour, and they are customarily regarded as 'special kinds' of learning (Shettleworth, 1993).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Recent theoretical work on the processes of cultural evolution helps to provide a clearer picture of the relationship between genetic and cultural influences on human behavior. The theory uses methods borrowed from evolutionary biology to study the unique properties of culture, but in a framework that permits a direct analysis of how genes and culture interact. The different scholars contributing to this program of research have rather different hypotheses regarding the relative importance of the processes that operate to cause cultural evolution. Some human sociobiologists propose that cultural evolution is very strongly constrained by the decision‐making of individuals. If so, human behavior can in principle be predicted rather directly from considerations of genetic fitness maximization. We are more impressed by the dynamic complexities introduced by a second system of inheritance. The difference between these hypotheses turns on the extent to which information is costly to acquire. When it is...

Previous articleNext article No AccessNew Biological BooksOrigins of the Modern Mind. Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Merlin Donald Harry J. JerisonHarry J. Jerison Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 67, Number 4Dec., 1992 Published in association with Stony Brook University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/417877 Views: 3Total views on this site Citations: 34Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Merlin Donald Précis of Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 737–748.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032647Michael A. Arbib From cooperative computation to man/machine symbiosis, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 748–749.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032659Derek Bickerton Putting cognitive carts before linguistic horses, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 749–750.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032660C. Loring Brace “Pop science” versus understanding the emergence of the modern mind, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 750–751.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032672Bruce Bridgeman, Margarita Azmitia Mimetic culture and modern sports: A synthesis, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 751–752.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032684Philip G. Chase Archaeology and the cognitive sciences in the study of human evolution, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 752–753.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032696Andy Clark Symbolic invention: The missing (computational) link?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 753–754.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032702Thomas L. Clarke A natural history of the mind: A guide for cognitive science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 754–755.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032714Alan Costall The place of cognition in human evolution, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 755–755.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032726Vilmos Csányi Human evolution: Emergence of the group-self, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 755–756.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032738Jeffrey Cynx, Stephen J. Clark Ethological foxes and cognitive hedgehogs, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 756–757.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0003274XJ. B. Deregowski What about pictures?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 757–758.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032751R. I. M. Dunbar The modern mind: Its missing parts?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 758–759.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032763Jerome A. Feldman From mimesis to synthesis, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 759–759.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032775James H. Fetzer Evolution needs a modern theory of the mind, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 759–760.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032787Liane M. Gabora Cultural transitions occur when mind parasites learn new tricks, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 760–761.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032799K. J. Gilhooly Working memory and its extensions, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 761–762.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032805John Halverson Mythos and logos, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 762–762.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032817P. J. Hampson From mimetic to mythic culture: Stimulus equivalence effects and prelinguistic cognition, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 763–763.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032829Harry J. Jerison The evolved mind, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 763–764.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032830Leonard D. Katz The gradual evolution of enhanced control by plans: A view from below, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 764–765.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032842Aarre Laakso Language equals mimesis plus speech, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 765–766.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032854Rudi Lutz Lessons from evolution for artificial intelligence?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 766–766.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032866Alexander Marshack Correct data base: Wrong model?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 767–768.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032878Robert W. Mitchell, H. Lyn Miles Apes have mimetic culture, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 768–768.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0003288XH. C. Plotkin Hunting memes, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 768–769.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032891Jocelyn Penny Small Memory, text and the Greek Revolution, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 769–770.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032908Evan Thompson Language, thought and consciousness in the modern mind, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 770–771.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0003291XMichael Tomasello It's imitation, not mimesis, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 771–772.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032921Jacques Vauclair, Joël Fagot Can a Saussurian ape be endowed with episodic memory only?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 772–773.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032933Christopher Wills Stages versus continuity, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 773–773.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032945Thomas Wynn Archaeological evidence for mimetic mind and culture, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 774–774.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032957Jiajie Zhang External representation: An issue for cognition, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 774–775.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032969Merlin Donald On the evolution of representational capacities, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no.44 (Feb 2010): 775–791.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00032970

Living systems, besides acquiring information ontologically, i.e., as an inherent part of their nature, have the special ability to constantly incorporate the available data on their environment through learning (cognition). Therefore, cognition is one of the basic properties that characterize living beings, since even lesser organisms display some kind of learning. This chapter shares the opinion that “humans are a cultural species,” because much of human behavior is determined by an information system acquired via social transmission. It is assumed that humans are characterized by the display of behaviors derived from information processing of three distinct natures: ontological, those acquired by individual experience, and those acquired by social transmission. It is recognized that culture can evolve following Darwinian assumptions, and that knowledge transmission is one of the elementary processes in cultural evolution and in the relation between people and their understanding of nature. This chapter now turns to the three bases description of human information, and then it turns its attention to social knowledge transfer from an evolutionary perspective. Finally, we discuss how information transmission has been analyzed by ethnobiological studies and how it can be used to understand the evolutionary dynamics of social-ecological systems, drawing upon standard ethnobiological works.

Cultural change constitutes a Darwinian evolutionary process, comprising the three Darwinian principles of variation, selection and inheritance. Yet cultural evolution is not identical to genetic evolution: the sources of variation, the forms of selection and the modes of inheritance found in cultural evolution may be very different to those found in genetic evolution. Here, I review research conducted in the last 30 years that has built a Darwinian theory of cultural change by borrowing the rigorous, quantitative methods developed by biologists to explain biological evolution, yet simultaneously acknowledging the differences between cultural and genetic evolution. I argue that the quantitative nature of Darwinian methods (e.g. statistical analysis, formal models, laboratory experiments) has resulted in a significantly better understanding of cultural phenomena than many traditional non-evolutionary, non-scientific approaches to cultural change in the social sciences and humanities. Evolutionary theory also provides a synthetic framework within which different branches of the social sciences and humanities may be integrated, equivalent to the “evolutionary synthesis” that integrated the biological sciences in the early 20th century.

A species is deemed cultural when there exists behavioural variation across populations that can be at least partly attributed to social learning. Understood in this way, culture has been found in all species of great apes. However some ape behaviours have additionally been claimed to be culture-dependent, implying that copying social learning mechanisms underlie their acquisition (as it occurs in human culture). If that was the case, these ape behaviours should have become locally restricted as a consequence of the unavoidable copying errors accumulated during their transmission between connected individuals. Based on this logic we developed the "Method of Local Restriction" in order to identify potential cases of culture-dependent forms in great apes which distribution is compatible with acquisition via copying (i.e. these behaviours are restricted to a single ape population). After conducting an exhaustive literature search across ape species, populations and behavioural domains, we found that the vast majority of great ape behaviours re-appear in unconnected populations and therefore do not necessarily rely on copying to be acquired. However, we found 25 locally restricted behaviours, three of which were locally unique to a single population of a single great ape species. These behaviours represent the best available candidates of culture-dependent forms in great apes, which reliance on copying social learning should be tested in targeted experiments. Overall our results suggest that great ape cultures are sustained by different learning mechanisms from those at play in human cultures, namely by individual learning mediated by non-copying social learning mechanisms.