The Cultural Macroevolution of Religion

Humans are ‘cultural animals’. We pass our innovations and cultural traits to our children and to our peers in a huge variety of ways—from direct teaching to strategic imitation. Relying on these ‘transmission mechanisms’, we construct vast, almost all-encompassing cultural and physical environments that reflect our cultural biases. But what effect does this variety of transmission mechanisms have on the dynamics of cultural evolution? From its beginnings in the work of Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman, and Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, the field of cultural evolution has had solid theoretical foundations and the quantitative theory of cultural transmission has formed a large part of this foundation. Models of transmission mechanisms have drawn on work from genetic evolution, ecology, economics, and epidemiology, extending and adapting them to account for unique features of cultural transmission. Since the 1970s, researchers have continued to add to and develop models of cultural transmission. To this body of analytical theory, researchers have also added a suite of simulation models that can incorporate more complexity and nuance. These models generate insight that would be inaccessible to us without modern computational power. This chapter reviews some of the most important and commonly applied approaches to modelling cultural transmission alongside some recent developments and potential future directions.

Social learning has allowed humans to build up extensive cultural repertoires, enabling them to adapt to a wide variety of environmental and social conditions. However, it is unclear which social learning strategies people use, especially in social contexts where their payoffs depend on the behaviour of others. Here we show experimentally that individuals differ in their social learning strategies and that they tend to employ the same learning strategy irrespective of the interaction context. Payoff-based learners focus on their peers' success, while decision-based learners disregard payoffs and exclusively focus on their peers' past behaviour. These individual differences may be of considerable importance for cultural evolution. By means of a simple model, we demonstrate that groups harbouring individuals with different learning strategies may be faster in adopting technological innovations and can be more efficient through successful role differentiation. Our study highlights the importance of individual variation for human interactions and sheds new light on the dynamics of cultural evolution.

Des debats recents sur la dependance de la demographie humaine vis-a-vis des modes de subsistance offrent de nouvelles pistes de reflexion pour les anthropologues et les archeologues qui travaillent sur les relations entre l'environnement naturel et les strategies de reproduction familiale, ou encore sur les origines de l'agriculture. Les AA. presentent les resultats d'une analyse synthetique prenant en compte diverses societes (a partir de sources bibliographiques) afin d'isoler les effets phylogenetiques en comparant uniquement les differences entre fertilite et mode de subsistance parmi les societes traditionnelles culturellement voisines (classification par aire geographique qui prend en compte l'ensemble du monde). L'etude quantitative mesure les degres de dependance selon la typologie des modes de subsistance representes majoritairement parmi chaque societe traditionnelle.

Notes on Contributors

The article considers the emergence of the phenomenon of morality and its evo­lution in the history of mankind and its culture. The authors present morality as a universal definition of a human, his inalienable property and the universal con­dition of his being. People cannot exist without a human relationship to each other, without morality, and it was in this connection that I. Kant asserted the autonomy of morality. Morality necessarily arises at the very early stages of the deve­lopment of human society, like thinking, language, consciousness, labor, inextri­cably linked with them and with society as a whole. It develops along with the development of man, human culture, all social relations, and reflects in its development the qualitative changes in society. The moral categories that arose at the dawn of the history of mankind are filled with new content, acquire a new meaning, new categories arise, and the old ones recede into the past. Turning to examples from ancient Greek mythology, and then from different historical peri­ods, the authors show how, in the course of history, people’s ideas about morality and about man in general have changed, how these changes have occurred in parallel with changes in the structure of social relations. Based on the views of ancient thinkers – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and then on the views of Kant, Montesquieu, Marx, Foucault – the authors investigate the formation of moral categories depending on a person’s understanding of his place in the world and in society and come to the conclusion that a society in which the authority of moral values is reduced, moral guidelines are blurred, cannot exist.

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.

The suppression of reproductive function is known to occur in women engaging in activities that require high energetic expenses, such as sport participation and subsistence work. It is still unclear, however, if reproductive suppression is a response to high levels of energy expenditure, or only to the resulting state of negative energy balance. To our knowledge, this study provides the first evidence that work-related energy expenditure alone, without associated negative energy balance, can lead to the suppression of reproductive function in women. We document suppression of ovarian function expressed as lowered salivary progesterone levels in women from an agricultural community who work hard, but remain in neutral energy balance. We propose two alternative evolutionary explanations (the 'pre-emptive ovarian suppression' hypothesis and the 'constrained down-regulation' hypothesis) for the observed results.

El progreso biológico es un tema ampliamente debatido en biología evolutiva que tiene partidarios y detractores. Sin embargo, no es una cuestión, a pesar de su importancia, de la que podamos afirmar que está resuelta desde el punto de vista científico. En este trabajo presento un análisis del concepto basado en la teoría de la evolución por selección natural, sus paralelismos con el también debatido concepto de “progreso” en la historia de la humanidad y, finalmente, se intenta orientarlo hacia formas accesibles a la investigación científica. Para ello, en lugar del concepto de progreso, recurro al de “complejidad biológica”. Si tenemos formas de medirla, podemos comprobar si las supuestas tendencias de la evolución hacia complejidad creciente son producto pasivo, aleatorio e inevitable de la misma, ya que solo puede esperarse algo complejo de algo que inicialmente era simple o, por el contrario, existe alguna fuerza direccional que requeriría interpretar la selección natural en una perspectiva más allá de la de tener efectos locales y microevolutivos. La importancia filosófica que esto tendría si este programa de investigación científica demostrara que la evolución avanza hacia una complejidad creciente es importante.

Collective violence: An evolutionary perspective

Humans are social animals. Group living provides us with security, food, and culturally transmitted knowledge, which has enabled the greatest achievements of human civilization. At the same time, categorizing individuals as ‘us’ vs ‘them’ also brings intergroup prejudice, discrimination, and even violent conflict, which has led to some of the deadliest events in human history. In this chapter, the authors discuss the complexity of intergroup relations from an evolutionary perspective. The authors first discuss the adaptive functions of group living and outline the mechanisms that maintain groups. Next, the authors discuss the evolutionary basis that contributes to the emergence of intergroup boundaries, hatred, and conflict. Although the tendency for intergroup conflict is pervasive, groups can sometimes overcome their boundaries and cooperate. In the last section, the authors explore factors that may attenuate intergroup conflict and provide suggestions for improving intergroup relations in this increasingly global world.

Book Review: Not Only Roars and Rituals. Communication in Animals

We explain persistent differences in cultural traits of immigrant groups with the presence of community leaders. Leaders influence the cultural traits of their community, which have an impact on the group's earnings. They determine whether a community will be more assimilated and wealthier or less assimilated and poorer. With a leader, cultural integration remains incomplete. The leader chooses more distinctive cultural traits in high-productivity environments and if the community is more connected. Lump-sum transfers to immigrants can hinder cultural integration. These findings are in line with integration patterns of various ethnic and religious groups.

A black spot of modern biology: Prions: Molecular and Cellular Biology edited by David A. Harris

Background/ObjectivesThe concept of ‘demand’ breastfeeding is central in public health. A key feature of the concept is that the infant is the locus of control in the breastfeeding process; when the breast is demanded by the infant, it is given the opportunity to feed. This study questions this notion of the infant as the locus of control in demand breastfeeding for empirical and theoretical reasons. From an evolutionary perspective, infants are expected to seek maximal investment and, against this backdrop of maximal investment-seeking, parents decide how much investment to put into offspring.MethodologyFocal follows were conducted among 113 mother–infant dyads in Papua New Guinea. During these follows, response times and types of responses, including breastfeeding to offspring fussing and crying, were recorded.ResultsInfants were breastfed an average of 3.6 times/hour for just over 2 min/feed. Fussing and crying were responded to quickly, with most response times under 1 min. When the mother responded, she breastfed the child approximately 52% of the time. The other 48% of the time, mothers responded to infants with other forms of pacification. Mothers were significantly less likely to respond to infants by breastfeeding if the child had been breastfed within the past 59–76 min.Conclusion/ImplicationsAs predicted by evolutionary parental investment theory, infants make frequent demands on their parents for investment, but mothers are ultimately the locus of control in the investment process. The mother decides whether and how frequently to breastfeed her offspring against this backdrop of near-continuous investment demands.

Despite advances in fields like genetics, evolutionary psychology, and human behavior and evolution--which generally focus on individual or small group behavior from a biological perspective--evolutionary biology has made little impact on studies of political change and social history. Theories of natural selection often seem inapplicable to human history because our social behavior is embedded in language (which makes possible the concepts of time and social identity on which what we call "history" depends). Peter Corning's Holistic Darwinism reconceptualizes evolutionary biology, making it possible to go beyond the barriers separating the social and natural sciences. Corning focuses on two primary processes: "synergy" (complex multivariate interactions at multiple levels between a species and its environment) and "cybernetics" (the information systems permitting communication between individuals and groups over time). Combining this frame of reference with inclusive fitness theory, it is possible to answer the most important (and puzzling) question in human history: How did a species that lived for millennia in hunter-gatherer bands form centralized states governing large populations of non-kin (including multi-ethnic empires as well as modern nation-states)? The fragility and contemporary ethnic violence in Kenya and the Congo should suffice as evidence that these issues need to be taken seriously. To explain the rise and fall of states as well as changes in human laws and customs--the core of historical research--it is essential to show how the provision of collective goods can overcome the challenge of self-interest and free-riding in some instances, yet fail to do so in others. To this end, it is now possible to consider how a state providing public goods can--under circumstances that often include effective leadership--contribute to enhanced inclusive fitness of virtually all its members. Because social behavior needs to adapt to ecology, but ecological systems are constantly transformed by human technology and social behavior, multilevel evolutionary processes can explain two central features of human history: the rise, transformations, and ultimate fall of centralized governments (the "stuff" of history); and the biological uniqueness of Homo sapiens as the mammalian species that colonized--and became top carnivore--in virtually every habitable environment on the earth's surface. Once scholars admit the necessity of linking processes of natural selection with human transformations of the natural world, it will seem anomalous that it has taken so long to integrate Darwinian biology and the social sciences.