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Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences
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, the 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.
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, the 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.
280 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 24, 2018
Read a bit of this for my Cultural Evolution module - will probably come back to it at some point! Pretty clearly written (at least the first few chapters are).
January 24, 2016
Most intellectually ambitious book I have read this year.
Without harping or patronizing, Alex Mesoudi plainly states that the social sciences, cultural anthropology in particular, are allergic to scientific methodology--no news there. But how it needn't be this way is what engages the intellect. Mesoudi's path forward leans on the ideas of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (gene-culture co-evolution) to argue for unifying the social sciences into an evolutionary framework, from history, to linguistics to psychology. Ambitious, yes, and Mesoudi delivers with detailed examples across the social sciences to support his case. Sorry, but cherry-picking a few here won't make the case. Messoudi is also up-front over the limitations of drawing parallels--no equivalent to the gene as a unit of selection in the social sciences--while remaining optimistic--the highly speculative exception of individual memory-containing neurons. I imagine Cultural Evolution is aimed at other social scientists, though biologists accustomed to equating environmental to background noise may also gain perspective.
Without harping or patronizing, Alex Mesoudi plainly states that the social sciences, cultural anthropology in particular, are allergic to scientific methodology--no news there. But how it needn't be this way is what engages the intellect. Mesoudi's path forward leans on the ideas of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (gene-culture co-evolution) to argue for unifying the social sciences into an evolutionary framework, from history, to linguistics to psychology. Ambitious, yes, and Mesoudi delivers with detailed examples across the social sciences to support his case. Sorry, but cherry-picking a few here won't make the case. Messoudi is also up-front over the limitations of drawing parallels--no equivalent to the gene as a unit of selection in the social sciences--while remaining optimistic--the highly speculative exception of individual memory-containing neurons. I imagine Cultural Evolution is aimed at other social scientists, though biologists accustomed to equating environmental to background noise may also gain perspective.
August 21, 2021
Humans are cultural in that we acquire a multitude of beliefs, knowledge, skills, and norms from other members of our species culturally, through social learning processes such as imitation, teaching, and language. Any explanation of human behaviour that ignores culture will almost certainly be incomplete. The social sciences have failed to provide a unifying and productive theory of cultural change.
Culture is stored in the brain and expressed in the form of behaviour, speech, artefacts, and institutions. Culture is not the only thing that affects behaviour, since culture can be distinguished from information that we acquire genetically and through individual learning. How can we be sure that culture really is important, compared to genes and individual learning? Think of the ultimatum game; people in different societies exhibit different degrees of fairness because they have acquired different fairness norms from other members of their society, which in turn have emerged because of different requirements of life in those socities. Our thinking and behaviour is deeply influenced by culture. If individual learning were responsible for variation in behaviour, then different ecological conditions would cause people to independently invent similar solutions to the problems posed by those ecological conditions; but two societies living in the same environment can have entirely different behavioural practices; individual learning alone cannot explain human behavioural variation. Further, the vast majority of between-group behavioural variation in humans simply cannot be explained by genetic differences either. The vast majority of human genetic variation (94%) is found within populations and a tiny proportion (6%) is found between populations.
The theory of cultural evolution offers a fully scientific, quantitative, and rigorous way of understanding and explaining cultural change. Social constructionists have valid points; the assumptions of the ethnographer will affect their conclusions, the act of observing may affect the observed, and social factors play a role in the scientific process. But this doesn’t mean that ethnography cannot ever be scientifically useful, or that science is entirely subjective. Regarding the social constructionists’ criticism that social factors influence the scientific process, while this may be the case, ultimately the objective tools of the scientific method - hypothesis testing, falsification, replication, quantitative statistical analyses, etc - result in a much more accurate understanding of the world than the nonscientific alternative of compiling subjective and superficial descriptions of people’s lives. Other branches that are fully scientific (economics, cultural psychology, sociology) suffer from a different problem; these disciplines treat culture as a static background variable that influences certain aspects of human behaviour, rather than as something that itself changes and is itself a product of human behaviour. The theory of cultural evolution, based on the premise that culture evolves according to similar Darwinian principles as do biological species, provides solutions to all of the problems just outlined: it fully recognises the role of culture in explanations of human behaviour; it provides formal, quantitative methods that can be used to explain cultural phenomena in a way that explicitly incorporates change over time; and it provides a common theoretical framework around which the different branches of the social sciences can be synthesised.
- DARWIN vs SPENCER: Spencer saw evolution as embodying a process of inevitable progress along a ladder of increasing complexity, from simple micro-organisms all the way up to humans; his view is distinctly teleological, in that evolution operates with an end goal in sight. Tylor and Morgan then saw cultural evolution as embodying a form of progress along a societal ladder; simple societies were placed at the bottom, and complex (Victorian) society was placed at the top. But Darwinian evolution is explicitly non-teleological; humans aren’t at the top because there is no ladder of which to be at the top. Complex societies aren’t necessarily better because of their complexity.
- DARWIN vs NEO-DARWINISM: Microevolution describes those small-scale, individual-level processes that act to change trait frequencies within a population; macroevolution describes large-scale patterns and trends above the species level. Microevolution found that genetic inheritance is particulate (transmission of discrete units of information in an all or nothing manner), non-Lamarckian, and that genetic mutation is blind with respect to selection. Adding these microevolutionary details to the basic theory of Darwinian evolution gave rise to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Is cultural transmission particulate? We don’t know. Is cultural evolution Lamarckian? The neo-Darwinian requirement that inheritance is strictly non-Lamarckian does not apply to cultural evolution. So cultural evolution is darwinian, but not neo-Darwinian, which led to the wholesale rejection of any kind of evolutionary theory of culture; but this is too hasty. What is needed is a theory of Darwinian cultural evolution that explicitly incorporates non-neo-Darwinian microevolutionary processes. The micro-macro divide that afflicted the biological sciences in the early twentieth century has a striking parallel in the social sciences today. The divide in the social sciences is between the microlevel (small-scale, individual-level processes that act to change the frequency of culturally transmitted traits within a single population) and the macrolevel (large-scale patterns and trends at or above the level of entire societies. The macro and micro levels are studied separately with little attempt to ensure that the findings at one level are consistent with the other; this is wrong. Macrolevel researches are often unwilling to explain macrolevel patterns in terms of underlying individual-level processes, and vice versa; micro level disciplines hav3 failed to acknowledge the extent to which macrolevel cultural processes shape individual behaviour, and a darwinian theory of culture can synthesise the social sciences.
- CULTURAL MICROEVOLUTION: in a typical cultural evolution model, a population is assumed to be composed of a set of individuals, each of whom possesses a particular set of cultural traits. Microevolutionary rocesses then change the variation in those traits over time, and the variation is then transmitted to the next generation. Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman, Boyd, and Richerson have built quantitative models to analyse the microevolutionary processes of cultural evolution.
Cultural transmission: genetic inheritance is often thought of as exclusively vertical and biparental; but in culture, one can learn beliefs, ideas, skills from people other than one’s parents; oblique cultural transmission is learnt from other members of the parental generation, and horizontal cultural transmission is learning from members of one’s own generation. When learning is done through parents; cultural change is slow. When learning is one-to-many, cultural change is fast, because one person can rapidly diffuse a novel idea or practice to a large number of people.
Blending Cultural Transmission: blending inheritance results in the reduction of cultural variation in the population; the homogenising effect of blending is counteracted by other cultural processes: when the cultural mutation rate is high, variation in memes increases. Secondly, where people preferentially learn from other people who are similar to them in their cultural traits, cultural variation increases.
Guided Variation (Lamarckian Inheritance): cultural change appears to be Lamarckian; in Boyd and Richerson’s models, one individual acquires information from a second individual, and then modifies that information according to their individual learning processes. This modified information is then transmitted to other individuals in the population. This Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics causes the population to move toward, and eventually converge upon, whatever behaviour is generally favoured by individual learning.
Cultural Selection: cultural selection is defined as any condition where one cultural trait is more likely to be acquired and passed on than an alternative cultural trait; cultural selection does not involve any modification of the trait itself, only changes in the frequency of that trait. The most obvious form of cultural selection are content biases, in which the intrinsic attractiveness of an idea, belief, affects it probability of being acquired.
Content Biases: Content biases seem similar to guided variation; but the two processes have different consequences. guided variation is where people individually modify acquired cultural traits according to their own individual learning biases. Content biases occur when people preferentially choose among existing traits found in the population without changing those traits. Guided variation is an individual process, content bias is a population process.
Frequency-Dependent Biases: Positive frequency-dependent bias is conformity, whereas negative bias is anticonformity. Conformity is where a learner is disproportionately more likely to adopt the most common trait in the population, relative to simply copying at random. Conformity causes whichever trait was initially most popular to drive all other traits to extinction.
Model-Based Biases:these occur when people preferentially adopt certain cultural traits not on teh basis of their intrinsic qualities but on the characteristics of the model exhibiting them. Why use characteristics of the model as a guide? Because it is a cheaper and easier way of acquiring advantageous cultural traits than via content bias, guided variation, or individual learning.
Prestige Bias: people preferentially copy very prestigious models who have high social status or excel in a particular skill.
Similarity Bias: people preferentially copy models who are similar to them in dress, dialect, or appearance.
Age Bias: people preferentially copy older models.
Cultural Drift: biologists find it useful to consider the case when no such directional processes are involved, when drift occurs. Accidents of history can lead to big differences in the frequencies of different alleles purely as an artefact of sampling error. Cultural drift is the analog in cultural evolution.
CULTURAL MACROEVOLUTION: this chapter examines how anthropologists have taken evolutionary methods developed by biologists to study biological macro evolution and used them to identify and measure patterns and trends in cultural macro evolution. Phylogenetics is when biologists use trees to represent the evolutionary history of groups of species; species that are placed closer together on the tree are more closely related. But inheritance is not the only reason two species might share the same characteristic; there’s also convergent evolution. Shared characteristics that are similar due to descent are known as homologies, whereas shared characteristics that are shared due to convergent evolution are known as homoplasies. These methods can also be usefully applied to cultural phenomena to reconstruct evolutionary relationships between different culturally transmitted artifacts, behaviours, or languages. Galton’s problem; wealthy societies are not wealthy because of neckties; the technological advances during the industrial revolution made Britain wealthy, not the necktie; but the custom of wearing a tie became associated with wealthy businessmen, and this problem of spurious correlations between traits due to history was recognised by Galton. The problem that societies cannot be assumed to be independent due to shared ancestry is known as Galton’s problem in anthropology. In 1994, Mace and Pagel suggested that social scientists can use phylogenetic methods to test hypotheses about cross-cultural variation; they argued that we can go beyond simply reconstructing evolutionary history and actually test functional hypotheses concerning why cultura traits occur together in distinct nonrandom patterns. An excellent example is cultural variation between different societies in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of these societies are pastoralist, others are horticultural. Societies also vary in the way in which they inherit wealth within families: some inherit along the female line, others down the male line. Cultural anthropologists have long observed a link between these two traits across African societies: those that keep livestock tend to be patrilineal, while horticultural societies tend to be matrilineal. But there may be Galton’s problem at play here: there may be a spurious correlation between patrilineal and pastoralist on the one hand and matrilineal and horticulture on the other, because all contemporary societies happen to descend from either a patrilineal, pastoralist ancestral society or a matrilineal, horticulturalist ancestral society, with the association across multiple groups simply an accident of history. Holden and Mace constructed a phylogenetic tree of 68 sub-Saharan African societies based on linguistic data, and found that closely related clusters of societies that all shared a recent common ancestor were also likely to share the same combination of subsistence and inheritance rule. Each society cannot be viewed as independent: clusters of societies are similar in their cultural traits because they inherited them from a common ancestor. It was also shown that changes in certain directions were more likely than others. Cattle-keeping matrilineal societies were most likely to either become patrilineal and cattle-keeping, or to stay matrilineal and lose their cattle. In other words, matrilineal and cattle-keeping was an unstable combination. Once a cattle-keeping society became patrilineal, it was unlikely to change in either trait. This evolutionary history can be explained because cattle are more useful to sons than daughters, and so favour a shift to patrilineal inheritance; grooms pay a bridewealth to the bride’s family in order to marry. Large herds of cattle allow a man to offer a larger bridewealth. Therefore the practice of keeping cattle makes a shift to patrilineal inheritance more likely.
- CULTURAL EVOLUTION in the LAB: a growing number of researchers have begun to use experiments to test the assumptions and predictions of cultural evolutionary models. First, let’s see how experiments have helped to uncover the causes of biological evolution. From a single genetically identical colony founded in 1998, Lenski has slowly bred over 45,000 generations of bacteria. Every five hundred generations a sample fo the colony is frozen at -80oC and kept in suspended animation. This allows Lenski and colleagues to measure the relative fitness of a particular generation of the colony compared to the original founder colony. These experiments generate unprecedentedly accurate data on evolutionary-driven fitness changes over time. Lenski’s studies have revealed that when a genetically identical colony is placed in a novel environment, fitness tends to increase rapidly at first before plateauing to a constant level. Another key benefit of laboratory experiment SN is the ability to ‘rerun’ evolutionary history multiple times. Because E. coli reproduce asexually, Lenski’s team can produce several genetically identical colonies, put them in the same environment and see whether the same evolutionary trends occur in each parallel lineage. This addresses a fundamental issue regarding whether biological evolution is fatalism (determinism is written in the book, but he means fatalism) or whether it is subject to the chance contingencies of history. Lenski’s experiments suggest that evolutionary trends are to some degree repeated, but with small historical deviations. So twelve replicate populations of E. coli all showed a similar pattern of change in fitness over time, with a rapid initial increase followed by an eventual leveling off. But different lineages converged on slightly different fitness values, with some slightly fitter than others. Laboratory experiments can be used to explore the microevolutionary mechanisms that underlie macroevolutionary patterns and trends. You can also simulate cultural evolution in the lab. In a typical cultural evolution experiment, cultural traits are passed along chains of participants or within small groups of participants. Now, these experiments come with drawbacks: what one gains in control and manipulation (internal validity) one loses in realism (external validity); so the solution to this problem lies in interdisciplinarity, which is a key facet of cultural evolution research. When used on their own, experiements have little value; but when informed by findings from archaeology, anthropology, history, and sociology, experiements can be rooted in real-life cultural phenomena.
- EVOLUTIONARY ETHNOGRAPHY: as we said before, experiments may have high internal validity, but they aren’t very realistic. So there is a need for field studies of cultural evolution. Some anthropologists have used modern statistical techniques to update the ethnographic method and partially solve such problems as self-report bias. Hewlett and Cavalli-Sforza conducted a study of cultural transmission among the Aka people; where they interview 72 Aka people, asking them about 50 skills that were thought to be important in Aka society. The interviewee was asked whether he knew the skill and from whom he/she had acquired it. The results indicated that vertical cultural transmission was the dominant mode of transmission in the Aka community; 81% were reported to have been learned from a parent. But a major problem with this type of study is the reliance on self-reports, since people know very little about themselves. So Robert Aunger devised a more indirect, but more accurate method of measuring cultural transmission. Aunger studied food taboos in a group of horticulturalists living in the Ituri forest in the Congo; he inferred patterns of transmission from the similarity between different people’s combinations of taboos. If children have similar taboos to their parents and dissimilar taboos to their peers, then Aunger might infer strong vertical transmission. The self-report measure were similar to Hewlett’s results; 76% were reported to have been acquired from parents. But Aunger’s similarity analysis suggested that the strength of these different forms of vertical transmission was far weaker than suggested by the self-report data. Another ethnographic study supports Aungers conclusion that vertical transmission is not always the dominant force in cultural evolution. So there is a large incentive for individuals to acquire accurate and comprehensive ethnobotanist knowledge and skills; but do Tsimane’ people do this via vertical, oblique, or horizonatal cultural transmission? The results showed that the cultural transmission of ethnobotanical competence among the Tsimane’ is primarily oblique, to some extent vertical, and seldom horizontal. The initial conclusion that vertical transmission is the dominant pathway in small-scale societies is giving way to a more nuanced understanding of the role of parents in cultural evolution. Cultural evolutionary theory provides a set of specific theoretical predictions that can guide ethnographic research.
Culture is stored in the brain and expressed in the form of behaviour, speech, artefacts, and institutions. Culture is not the only thing that affects behaviour, since culture can be distinguished from information that we acquire genetically and through individual learning. How can we be sure that culture really is important, compared to genes and individual learning? Think of the ultimatum game; people in different societies exhibit different degrees of fairness because they have acquired different fairness norms from other members of their society, which in turn have emerged because of different requirements of life in those socities. Our thinking and behaviour is deeply influenced by culture. If individual learning were responsible for variation in behaviour, then different ecological conditions would cause people to independently invent similar solutions to the problems posed by those ecological conditions; but two societies living in the same environment can have entirely different behavioural practices; individual learning alone cannot explain human behavioural variation. Further, the vast majority of between-group behavioural variation in humans simply cannot be explained by genetic differences either. The vast majority of human genetic variation (94%) is found within populations and a tiny proportion (6%) is found between populations.
The theory of cultural evolution offers a fully scientific, quantitative, and rigorous way of understanding and explaining cultural change. Social constructionists have valid points; the assumptions of the ethnographer will affect their conclusions, the act of observing may affect the observed, and social factors play a role in the scientific process. But this doesn’t mean that ethnography cannot ever be scientifically useful, or that science is entirely subjective. Regarding the social constructionists’ criticism that social factors influence the scientific process, while this may be the case, ultimately the objective tools of the scientific method - hypothesis testing, falsification, replication, quantitative statistical analyses, etc - result in a much more accurate understanding of the world than the nonscientific alternative of compiling subjective and superficial descriptions of people’s lives. Other branches that are fully scientific (economics, cultural psychology, sociology) suffer from a different problem; these disciplines treat culture as a static background variable that influences certain aspects of human behaviour, rather than as something that itself changes and is itself a product of human behaviour. The theory of cultural evolution, based on the premise that culture evolves according to similar Darwinian principles as do biological species, provides solutions to all of the problems just outlined: it fully recognises the role of culture in explanations of human behaviour; it provides formal, quantitative methods that can be used to explain cultural phenomena in a way that explicitly incorporates change over time; and it provides a common theoretical framework around which the different branches of the social sciences can be synthesised.
- DARWIN vs SPENCER: Spencer saw evolution as embodying a process of inevitable progress along a ladder of increasing complexity, from simple micro-organisms all the way up to humans; his view is distinctly teleological, in that evolution operates with an end goal in sight. Tylor and Morgan then saw cultural evolution as embodying a form of progress along a societal ladder; simple societies were placed at the bottom, and complex (Victorian) society was placed at the top. But Darwinian evolution is explicitly non-teleological; humans aren’t at the top because there is no ladder of which to be at the top. Complex societies aren’t necessarily better because of their complexity.
- DARWIN vs NEO-DARWINISM: Microevolution describes those small-scale, individual-level processes that act to change trait frequencies within a population; macroevolution describes large-scale patterns and trends above the species level. Microevolution found that genetic inheritance is particulate (transmission of discrete units of information in an all or nothing manner), non-Lamarckian, and that genetic mutation is blind with respect to selection. Adding these microevolutionary details to the basic theory of Darwinian evolution gave rise to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Is cultural transmission particulate? We don’t know. Is cultural evolution Lamarckian? The neo-Darwinian requirement that inheritance is strictly non-Lamarckian does not apply to cultural evolution. So cultural evolution is darwinian, but not neo-Darwinian, which led to the wholesale rejection of any kind of evolutionary theory of culture; but this is too hasty. What is needed is a theory of Darwinian cultural evolution that explicitly incorporates non-neo-Darwinian microevolutionary processes. The micro-macro divide that afflicted the biological sciences in the early twentieth century has a striking parallel in the social sciences today. The divide in the social sciences is between the microlevel (small-scale, individual-level processes that act to change the frequency of culturally transmitted traits within a single population) and the macrolevel (large-scale patterns and trends at or above the level of entire societies. The macro and micro levels are studied separately with little attempt to ensure that the findings at one level are consistent with the other; this is wrong. Macrolevel researches are often unwilling to explain macrolevel patterns in terms of underlying individual-level processes, and vice versa; micro level disciplines hav3 failed to acknowledge the extent to which macrolevel cultural processes shape individual behaviour, and a darwinian theory of culture can synthesise the social sciences.
- CULTURAL MICROEVOLUTION: in a typical cultural evolution model, a population is assumed to be composed of a set of individuals, each of whom possesses a particular set of cultural traits. Microevolutionary rocesses then change the variation in those traits over time, and the variation is then transmitted to the next generation. Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman, Boyd, and Richerson have built quantitative models to analyse the microevolutionary processes of cultural evolution.
Cultural transmission: genetic inheritance is often thought of as exclusively vertical and biparental; but in culture, one can learn beliefs, ideas, skills from people other than one’s parents; oblique cultural transmission is learnt from other members of the parental generation, and horizontal cultural transmission is learning from members of one’s own generation. When learning is done through parents; cultural change is slow. When learning is one-to-many, cultural change is fast, because one person can rapidly diffuse a novel idea or practice to a large number of people.
Blending Cultural Transmission: blending inheritance results in the reduction of cultural variation in the population; the homogenising effect of blending is counteracted by other cultural processes: when the cultural mutation rate is high, variation in memes increases. Secondly, where people preferentially learn from other people who are similar to them in their cultural traits, cultural variation increases.
Guided Variation (Lamarckian Inheritance): cultural change appears to be Lamarckian; in Boyd and Richerson’s models, one individual acquires information from a second individual, and then modifies that information according to their individual learning processes. This modified information is then transmitted to other individuals in the population. This Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics causes the population to move toward, and eventually converge upon, whatever behaviour is generally favoured by individual learning.
Cultural Selection: cultural selection is defined as any condition where one cultural trait is more likely to be acquired and passed on than an alternative cultural trait; cultural selection does not involve any modification of the trait itself, only changes in the frequency of that trait. The most obvious form of cultural selection are content biases, in which the intrinsic attractiveness of an idea, belief, affects it probability of being acquired.
Content Biases: Content biases seem similar to guided variation; but the two processes have different consequences. guided variation is where people individually modify acquired cultural traits according to their own individual learning biases. Content biases occur when people preferentially choose among existing traits found in the population without changing those traits. Guided variation is an individual process, content bias is a population process.
Frequency-Dependent Biases: Positive frequency-dependent bias is conformity, whereas negative bias is anticonformity. Conformity is where a learner is disproportionately more likely to adopt the most common trait in the population, relative to simply copying at random. Conformity causes whichever trait was initially most popular to drive all other traits to extinction.
Model-Based Biases:these occur when people preferentially adopt certain cultural traits not on teh basis of their intrinsic qualities but on the characteristics of the model exhibiting them. Why use characteristics of the model as a guide? Because it is a cheaper and easier way of acquiring advantageous cultural traits than via content bias, guided variation, or individual learning.
Prestige Bias: people preferentially copy very prestigious models who have high social status or excel in a particular skill.
Similarity Bias: people preferentially copy models who are similar to them in dress, dialect, or appearance.
Age Bias: people preferentially copy older models.
Cultural Drift: biologists find it useful to consider the case when no such directional processes are involved, when drift occurs. Accidents of history can lead to big differences in the frequencies of different alleles purely as an artefact of sampling error. Cultural drift is the analog in cultural evolution.
CULTURAL MACROEVOLUTION: this chapter examines how anthropologists have taken evolutionary methods developed by biologists to study biological macro evolution and used them to identify and measure patterns and trends in cultural macro evolution. Phylogenetics is when biologists use trees to represent the evolutionary history of groups of species; species that are placed closer together on the tree are more closely related. But inheritance is not the only reason two species might share the same characteristic; there’s also convergent evolution. Shared characteristics that are similar due to descent are known as homologies, whereas shared characteristics that are shared due to convergent evolution are known as homoplasies. These methods can also be usefully applied to cultural phenomena to reconstruct evolutionary relationships between different culturally transmitted artifacts, behaviours, or languages. Galton’s problem; wealthy societies are not wealthy because of neckties; the technological advances during the industrial revolution made Britain wealthy, not the necktie; but the custom of wearing a tie became associated with wealthy businessmen, and this problem of spurious correlations between traits due to history was recognised by Galton. The problem that societies cannot be assumed to be independent due to shared ancestry is known as Galton’s problem in anthropology. In 1994, Mace and Pagel suggested that social scientists can use phylogenetic methods to test hypotheses about cross-cultural variation; they argued that we can go beyond simply reconstructing evolutionary history and actually test functional hypotheses concerning why cultura traits occur together in distinct nonrandom patterns. An excellent example is cultural variation between different societies in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of these societies are pastoralist, others are horticultural. Societies also vary in the way in which they inherit wealth within families: some inherit along the female line, others down the male line. Cultural anthropologists have long observed a link between these two traits across African societies: those that keep livestock tend to be patrilineal, while horticultural societies tend to be matrilineal. But there may be Galton’s problem at play here: there may be a spurious correlation between patrilineal and pastoralist on the one hand and matrilineal and horticulture on the other, because all contemporary societies happen to descend from either a patrilineal, pastoralist ancestral society or a matrilineal, horticulturalist ancestral society, with the association across multiple groups simply an accident of history. Holden and Mace constructed a phylogenetic tree of 68 sub-Saharan African societies based on linguistic data, and found that closely related clusters of societies that all shared a recent common ancestor were also likely to share the same combination of subsistence and inheritance rule. Each society cannot be viewed as independent: clusters of societies are similar in their cultural traits because they inherited them from a common ancestor. It was also shown that changes in certain directions were more likely than others. Cattle-keeping matrilineal societies were most likely to either become patrilineal and cattle-keeping, or to stay matrilineal and lose their cattle. In other words, matrilineal and cattle-keeping was an unstable combination. Once a cattle-keeping society became patrilineal, it was unlikely to change in either trait. This evolutionary history can be explained because cattle are more useful to sons than daughters, and so favour a shift to patrilineal inheritance; grooms pay a bridewealth to the bride’s family in order to marry. Large herds of cattle allow a man to offer a larger bridewealth. Therefore the practice of keeping cattle makes a shift to patrilineal inheritance more likely.
- CULTURAL EVOLUTION in the LAB: a growing number of researchers have begun to use experiments to test the assumptions and predictions of cultural evolutionary models. First, let’s see how experiments have helped to uncover the causes of biological evolution. From a single genetically identical colony founded in 1998, Lenski has slowly bred over 45,000 generations of bacteria. Every five hundred generations a sample fo the colony is frozen at -80oC and kept in suspended animation. This allows Lenski and colleagues to measure the relative fitness of a particular generation of the colony compared to the original founder colony. These experiments generate unprecedentedly accurate data on evolutionary-driven fitness changes over time. Lenski’s studies have revealed that when a genetically identical colony is placed in a novel environment, fitness tends to increase rapidly at first before plateauing to a constant level. Another key benefit of laboratory experiment SN is the ability to ‘rerun’ evolutionary history multiple times. Because E. coli reproduce asexually, Lenski’s team can produce several genetically identical colonies, put them in the same environment and see whether the same evolutionary trends occur in each parallel lineage. This addresses a fundamental issue regarding whether biological evolution is fatalism (determinism is written in the book, but he means fatalism) or whether it is subject to the chance contingencies of history. Lenski’s experiments suggest that evolutionary trends are to some degree repeated, but with small historical deviations. So twelve replicate populations of E. coli all showed a similar pattern of change in fitness over time, with a rapid initial increase followed by an eventual leveling off. But different lineages converged on slightly different fitness values, with some slightly fitter than others. Laboratory experiments can be used to explore the microevolutionary mechanisms that underlie macroevolutionary patterns and trends. You can also simulate cultural evolution in the lab. In a typical cultural evolution experiment, cultural traits are passed along chains of participants or within small groups of participants. Now, these experiments come with drawbacks: what one gains in control and manipulation (internal validity) one loses in realism (external validity); so the solution to this problem lies in interdisciplinarity, which is a key facet of cultural evolution research. When used on their own, experiements have little value; but when informed by findings from archaeology, anthropology, history, and sociology, experiements can be rooted in real-life cultural phenomena.
- EVOLUTIONARY ETHNOGRAPHY: as we said before, experiments may have high internal validity, but they aren’t very realistic. So there is a need for field studies of cultural evolution. Some anthropologists have used modern statistical techniques to update the ethnographic method and partially solve such problems as self-report bias. Hewlett and Cavalli-Sforza conducted a study of cultural transmission among the Aka people; where they interview 72 Aka people, asking them about 50 skills that were thought to be important in Aka society. The interviewee was asked whether he knew the skill and from whom he/she had acquired it. The results indicated that vertical cultural transmission was the dominant mode of transmission in the Aka community; 81% were reported to have been learned from a parent. But a major problem with this type of study is the reliance on self-reports, since people know very little about themselves. So Robert Aunger devised a more indirect, but more accurate method of measuring cultural transmission. Aunger studied food taboos in a group of horticulturalists living in the Ituri forest in the Congo; he inferred patterns of transmission from the similarity between different people’s combinations of taboos. If children have similar taboos to their parents and dissimilar taboos to their peers, then Aunger might infer strong vertical transmission. The self-report measure were similar to Hewlett’s results; 76% were reported to have been acquired from parents. But Aunger’s similarity analysis suggested that the strength of these different forms of vertical transmission was far weaker than suggested by the self-report data. Another ethnographic study supports Aungers conclusion that vertical transmission is not always the dominant force in cultural evolution. So there is a large incentive for individuals to acquire accurate and comprehensive ethnobotanist knowledge and skills; but do Tsimane’ people do this via vertical, oblique, or horizonatal cultural transmission? The results showed that the cultural transmission of ethnobotanical competence among the Tsimane’ is primarily oblique, to some extent vertical, and seldom horizontal. The initial conclusion that vertical transmission is the dominant pathway in small-scale societies is giving way to a more nuanced understanding of the role of parents in cultural evolution. Cultural evolutionary theory provides a set of specific theoretical predictions that can guide ethnographic research.
June 22, 2017
Excellent introduction to a field I barely knew existed before reading it. Mesoudi makes a persuasive case that culture can and should be analysed using a Darwinian framework. He decries a poor state of affairs in the social sciences characterised by low levels of interdisciplinary cooperation and in some cases a rejection of ideals of scientific progress. He argues that agreeing on such a common theoretical framework can help to unify the social sciences and propel their scientific project. Significantly, he distinguishes between Darwinian and neo-Darwinian models of evolution, underlining that cultural evolution is Darwinian rather than neo-Darwinian. This is because cultural evolution involves variation, competition and inheritance, the essence of Darwin's theory as outlined in The Origin of The Species and not the full modern understanding of biological evolution involving transmission of genes.
He provides a rough guide to some of the key questions in cultural evolution and shows how methods and tools gleaned from the life sciences can be used to provide persuasive answer to them. For example, he describes how archaeologists have used phylogenetic modelling of arrowhead features to determine how the practice of making arrows spread among native American tribes. He also discusses Peter Turchin's work in modelling the impact of cultural factors on the rise and decline of historical empires. By using quantitative models, Turchin was able to rigorously test competing explanations for empires' historical fortunes.
Finally he concludes by drafting a framework of study for a unified evolutionary social science.
He provides a rough guide to some of the key questions in cultural evolution and shows how methods and tools gleaned from the life sciences can be used to provide persuasive answer to them. For example, he describes how archaeologists have used phylogenetic modelling of arrowhead features to determine how the practice of making arrows spread among native American tribes. He also discusses Peter Turchin's work in modelling the impact of cultural factors on the rise and decline of historical empires. By using quantitative models, Turchin was able to rigorously test competing explanations for empires' historical fortunes.
Finally he concludes by drafting a framework of study for a unified evolutionary social science.
April 16, 2025
I had this book on my "want to read" list for years but could never find it used or in a library. I should have bought it new sooner! If you're interested in evolution and especially evolution and culture, this book is worth buying if you run into a similar situation like me where you can't find it anywhere else. In Cultural Evolution, Alex Mesoudi reviews research on evolution and culture from Darwin up until the time the book was written over a decade ago. I believe he accomplishes what he set out to do, which as the subtitle implies, was to synthesis the study of culture with evolutionary biology. I may be a bit biased since I already believed what Mesoudi presents to be true ever since reading Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine years ago. He does cover Blackmore's work and doesn't dismiss memetics, rather, he tries to cover cultural evolution from a broader perspective without putting all his eggs in that basket.
I see this as another step forward and want more! It makes me wonder what other relatively unknown but brilliant books are out there that could be the missing steps to advancing our collective knowledge. The only reason I knocked it a star was I found the several chapters covering experimental evidence a bit dull. But other than that, it's certainly well worth the read!
I see this as another step forward and want more! It makes me wonder what other relatively unknown but brilliant books are out there that could be the missing steps to advancing our collective knowledge. The only reason I knocked it a star was I found the several chapters covering experimental evidence a bit dull. But other than that, it's certainly well worth the read!
May 21, 2021
This is a very well-written introduction to cultural evolutionary theory. At the same time, Mesoudi does an excellent job of highlighting research that would be of interest to scholars already well-versed in cultural evolutionary theory. My only gripe, and it's a small one, is that he neglects some powerhouse researchers in this field. Most notably, despite covering group-level selection in considerable detail, he never once mentions David Sloan Wilson, which seems more like deliberate slight than careless oversight. Again, this is a minor complaint. I found this a refreshing walk through my old stomping grounds.
December 27, 2024
The idea of evolutionary theory applied to culture is well explained, and engagingly written. Where it weakens is the insistence that the only way to do this is through quantitative models. Application of quantitative tools of course, is useful and is explained thus. But arguing that this is the only way is not very well done rather than through varied circular points and fallacies. Also has resulted in at least a few "errors" - quantituatvely "proving" lack of cultural change in animals and the "falsification" of the Kurgan hypothesis in PIE. Rather than "definite truths", these reveal complexities elsewhere acknowledged. Missing out on this nuance due to the quantitative only focus.
December 12, 2024
Not as mathematical or as comprehensive as I had hoped it would be but nonetheless fascinating. I wish I'd have a true 1000 page undergrad textbook tying all social sciences together based on this framework.
March 6, 2025
So interesting - very cool and valid ideas presented in a great format. Was very engaged in the first half but got lost in the sauce at some points. I enjoyed Mesoudi’s writing style and the endless examples. Cultural ev is so cool
July 25, 2020
Summary: if all branches of social sciences develop a cohesive mechanism to understand cultural evolution as we observed in biological evolution, then it would portray a better picture of culture evolution.
March 16, 2017
In Cultural Evolution Mesoudi does a great job in reviewing the state of the art in applying Darwin-inspired evolutionary models to cultural evolution. He convincingly argues for the interplay between experimental, field and simulation studies. The only fault I can find in the book is the (partly surprising) internal reductionism. On page 42, for instance, Mesoudi argues that the exact format of cultural units has to be determined by neuroscientists, in what he later calls a neuromemetics. There is some quite persuasive work on how culture and social interactions are not reducible in any simple way to their neural underpinnings (which certainly play an important role). Hutchins for instance shows how certain cultural practices (e.g. sailing a warship) require supra-individual coordination of individual complementary cognitive processes, as well as material objects. Making a decision in such a context require online coupling of different tools and specialists, which could never - given its complexity and distribution - be reducible to the internal workings of a single individual. Similarly in agent-based models we often observe the emergence of complex supra-individual patterns, which feedback and constrain the individual mechanisms without being represented within the individual agents.
So cultural evolution is also a matter of the evolution, preservation and change of these supra-individual coordinative structures. And this is a chapter missing from the book.
So cultural evolution is also a matter of the evolution, preservation and change of these supra-individual coordinative structures. And this is a chapter missing from the book.
April 19, 2015
An interesting book that promises more than it could deliver. This doesn't appear to be the author's fault, and perhaps the publisher hyped its content beyond what it can reasonably be expected to sustain. Cultural evolution research is in its early days, and this is an overview of some of the more interesting findings to date. As such it doesn't "cover" a wide range of topics in any comprehensive sense, as the blurb implies, but it does 'touch' on them (although one mentioned, public policy, apparently passed me by - I couldn't find it anywhere, it it was my sole reason for buying the book). I look forward to more work from Mesoudi on this topic, with greater breadth, depth, and perhaps some of that theoretical sophistication which will give us a welcome synthesis of the social sciences; a synthesis promised in this book, but a promise unfulfilled.
August 29, 2012
Not super gripping, but since I do this stuff, I found it a really good overview on the state of the field. Also, there is no greater cheerleader for the field of cultural evolution than Mesoudi, and it's nice to feel his enthusiasm.
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