The evolution of false theories

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.

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.

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...

This study provides an account of how a naturalistic orientation in epistemology known as evolutionary epistemology can benefit from integration with some more recent advancements in cultural evolutionary theory. In particular, this thesis explores the ways in which a Darwinian selective framework of culture provides new insights to rethink unsolved epistemological disputes and problems such as the growth of scientific ideas, the notion of scientific progress, the ‘context distinction’, the theory ladenness of science and a demarcation criterion between science and other cultural realms. All these issues are approached from an evolutionary and selective standpoint that assumes that biological and cultural selection are representative of a wider and more encompassing selective process. Thus, the thesis also explores theoretical disputes concerning the analogies and disanalogies between cultural and biological selection. Five early evolutionary analogies of knowledge accretion are explored in the first chapter setting the context of the debate for the epistemological issues that are connected in the other chapters to cultural evolution. Here, a populationist account of scientific ideas is presented as a viable model to study the conceptual and ‘ideational’ dynamics of change in science. In the last part of this work, my populationist and selective model is applied to study a specific scientific innovation: a molecular technique for taxonomic identification and classification known as DNA barcoding. Finally, the last chapter explores the use of text analysis to investigate the network of concepts and ideas that relate to the ‘DNA barcoding’ concept’. Here, I evaluate the impact of this technique on the fields of taxonomy/systematics, particularly, for what concerns the so called ‘species problem’.

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.

The question of how and why innovations spread through populations has been the focus of extensive research in various scientific disciplines over recent decades. Generally, innovation diffusion is defined as the process whereby a few members of a social system initially adopt an innovation, then over time more individuals adopt until all (or most) members have adopted the new idea (e.g. Rogers 2003; Ryan and Gross 1943; Valente 1993). Anthropologists and archaeologists have argued that this process is one of the most important processes in cultural evolution (Richerson et al. 1996) and much work has been devoted to describing and analysing the temporal and spatial patterns of the spread of novel techniques and ideas from a particular source to their present distributions. Classic case studies include the spread of agricultural inventions such as hybrid corn (e.g. Griliches 1957; Ryan and Gross 1943), the spread of historic gravestone motifs in New England (Dethlefsen and Deetz 1966; Scholnick 2012), and the spread of bow and arrow technology (Bettinger and Eerkins 1999). (For a more comprehensive list see Rogers and Shoemaker (1971) who reviewed 1,500 studies of innovation diffusion.) Interestingly, the temporal diffusion dynamic in almost all case studies is characterized by an S-shaped diffusion curve describing the fraction of the population which has adopted the innovation at a certain point in time. Similarly, the spatial dynamics tend to resemble travelling wave-like patterns (see Steele 2009 for examples). The basic puzzle posed by innovation diffusion is the observed lag between an innovation’s first appearance and its general acceptance within a population (Young 2009). In other words, what are the individual-level mechanisms that give rise to the observed population-level pattern? Again, scientific fields as diverse as economics/marketing science (e.g. Bass 1969; Van den Bulte and Stremersch 2004; Young 2009), geography (e.g. Hägerstrand 1967), or social science (e.g. Henrich 2001; Steele 2009; Valente 1996; Watts 2002) offer interesting insights into this question without reaching a consensus about the general nature of individual adoption decisions. In archaeological and anthropological applications, population-level patterns inferred from the archaeological record, such as adoption curves, are often the only direct evidence about past cultural traditions (Shennan 2011).

Previous articleNext article No AccessNew Biological BooksBehavior Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution. Origins of Human Behavior and Culture, Volume 2. Edited by StephenShennan. Berkeley (California): University of California Press. $60.00. vii 341 p.; ill.; index. 9780520255999. 2009.R.LeeLymanR.LeeLymanAnthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri Search for more articles by this author Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MissouriPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 84, Number 3September 2009 Published in association with Stony Brook University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/644687 Views: 6Total views on this site 2009 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Abstract: 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?

The problem ofjustifying democracy arises when a society sees the need for cooperative, collective action. Collective action may be needed to solve coordination problems, public goods problems, Prisoner's Dilemmas, and other structural problems of human interaction or perhaps to realize common ideals of justice in concrete political institutions. Once the need for collective action is established, one must ask how the goals of a cooperative endeavor are to be secured. Cooperation requires that individuals, at least over a specified range of activity, pursue a joint strategy. To assure voluntary compliance in a joint venture, cooperation must be to each person's advantage. However, each person may have an incentive to induce others to cooperate and to defect from the joint strategy in the hope of enjoying the fruits of cooperation without incurring the opportunity costs of compliance. This is the essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and considerations of this sort suggest that if collective action is to succeed, policies or strategies formed collectively must be coercively enforceable. Coercion, however, requires justification. Because solving the problem of rational noncompliance requires that collective decisions be coercively enforceable, the rules by which collective decisions are reached require justification. Douglas Rae neatly puts the problem of justification that emerges when political solutions are coercively enforceable as follows: "Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: 'How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?"" This is essentially the question to which the principle of democratic rule provides an answer: by what process are collective decisions to be made? Answering Rae's question requires a normative framework. We could say that a procedure for making collective decisions is justified if and

Formulation of a general model of evolution is presented which is based upon the recognition of the "biosocial" entity, that is the biosphere and human society, as a component‐system. It can be demonstrated that the interactions of the components (moleculas, cells, organisms, ecosystems in the biological realms and people, artifacts and ideas in the societies) have replicative organization. We suggest an explanation for the spontaneous emergence of replicative function and organization, a process called autogenesis. During autogenesis, hierarchical levels of replicative organization emerge and compartmentalization and convergence of replicative information occurs. Questions of the origin and evolution of life are discussed. The replicative paradigm can also be applied to the processes of cultural evolution, in which complex replicative networks of people, ideas, and man‐made artifacts show all stages and phenomena of autogenesis. Finally, the present state of evolution of the whole global biosocial system is discussed.

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.

Within the field of cultural evolution, particular attention has been devoted to the process of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). Much of modern human behaviour is believed to be attributable to CCE. Despite common consensus over the importance of this topic, there are disparities in how the term has been defined and interpreted (and correspondingly the breadth of phenomena it is considered to encompass). Defined broadly, CCE refers to processes of cultural change involving alterations in cultural traits occurring over multiple episodes of social transmission, but there is variation in the additional criteria considered to be defining features. This chapter will highlight points of contention by examining some key borderline cases, which illustrate how the preferred definition of CCE impacts its presumed scope (e.g. whether it is restricted to humans). It is likely that differing motivations for interest in CCE underpin some of the differences in characterization of the process.

This review traces the development of the field of cultural primatology from its origins in Japan in the 1950s to the present. The field has experienced a number of theoretical and methodological influences from diverse fields, including comparative experimental psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis, behavioral ecology, cultural anthropology, and gene-culture coevolution theory. Our understanding of cultural dynamics and the evolution of culture cannot be complete without comparative studies of (a) how socioecological variables affect cultural transmission dynamics, (b) the proximate mechanisms by which social learning is achieved, (c) developmental studies of the role of social influence in acquiring behavioral traits, and (d) the fitness consequences of engaging in social learning.

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.

Religious systems have the key properties of an evolutionary system: they are inherited over time, are subject to change, and differ in their ability to gain and retain members. The cultural macroevolutionary study of religion seeks to identify and understand generalizable patterns of religious change over human history. This chapter is structured around four questions about the macroevolution of religion. First, what are the modes of religion transmission? Second, what is the tempo of religious change? Third, how do religions coevolve with other cultural and environmental traits? Fourth, what factors explain the rise and fall of religious systems in human history? Each topic is explained from an evolutionary perspective, along with an overview of empirical research. This research has been a testing ground for theories of cultural evolution, though many key questions remain unresolved. Further research directed at answering these questions will provide a richer understanding of religion, as well as the dynamics of cultural evolution.