Cultural Evolution

Abstract

Humans are a highly successful species who colonized most of the planet's major ecosystems long before agriculture, cities, and modern industrial technologies. Our success was certainly not due to our physical prowess, but perhaps surprisingly, also not due to our intelligence. In this chapter, we explain that what makes our species unique is not our raw brainpower per se, but what's in them. We are an evolved cultural species, completely reliant on a body of knowledge that has accumulated over generations. We explain how genetic evolution led us to become a cultural species and outline the evolved psychology that underlies our second line of inheritance—culture. We then discuss how that body of knowledge itself evolves as these psychological mechanisms play out in our societies and social networks. Cultural evolution builds adaptations, shapes our preferences and thinking, and sometimes leads to maladaptive practices. Our technology, practices, and know‐how also shape our genes, which in turn shape culture; genes and culture coevolve. Finally, we discuss how intergroup competition shapes cultural evolution, and how the processes of cultural group selection can help resolve evolutionary puzzles, such as the emergence of modern religions.

Innovation in the collective brain

“…dangerous animals [56], the edibility of plants [57], fire [58] and gossip [59]). For further discussion and reviews, see Chudek et al [25]. These learning strategies selectively network many cultural brains into larger collective brains.…”

The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, sociality, and life history

“…In our model, l is a one-dimensional state variable that captures better and worse ability to select models, but of course in the real world, there are a range of strategies and biases that have evolved to solve the problem of selecting models with more adaptive knowledge. For a discussion of the evolution of these biases and strategies and the trade-offs between them, see [ 19 , 67 ]. For a list of such biases and strategies, see [ 68 , 69 ].…”

Unselective Overimitators: The Evolutionary Implications of Children's Indiscriminate Copying of Successful and Prestigious Models

“…Children's selective learning has been invoked to test evolutionary claims about how human cultural transmission first arose. Though our culture‐pioneering ancestors' patterns of selective learning are the focus of a great deal of evolutionary theorizing (e.g., Boyd & Richerson, ; Cavalli‐Sforza & Feldman, ; Chudek, Muthukrishna, & Henrich, ; Henrich & Henrich, ; Laland & Brown, ; Mesoudi, ; Richerson & Boyd, ), they can no longer be directly observed. However, adaptation claims can be tested by comparing the predictions of evolutionary models to the selective dispositions of contemporary children (for a review, see Chudek, Brosseau‐Liard, Birch, & Henrich, ).…”