Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss

Human societies are no doubt complex. They are characterized by division of labour, multiple hierarchies, intricate communication networks and transport systems. These phenomena and others have led scholars to propose that human society may be, or may become, a new hierarchical level that may dominate the individual humans within it, similar to the relations between an organism and its cells, or an ant colony and its members. Recent discussions of the possibility of this major evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) raise interesting and controversial questions that are explored in the present issue from four different complementary perspectives. (i) The general theory of ETIs. (ii) The unique aspects of cultural evolution. (iii) The evolutionary history and pre-history of humans. (iv) Specific routes of a possible human ETI. Each perspective uses different tools provided by different disciplines: biology, anthropology, cultural evolution, systems theory, psychology, economy, linguistics and philosophy of science. Altogether, this issue provides a broad and rich application of the notion of ETI to human past, present and perhaps also future evolution. It presents important case studies, new theoretical results and novel questions for future research. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions’.

Section: Line B: Cultural Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions: introduction to the theme issue

Carmel

Shavit

Lamm

et al. 2023

“…The cultural repertoire of modern societies is vast, and even merely its aspects that are related to technology cannot be manifested by any single individual. DAs in the form of cultural specialization into professional guilds, in the sense that knowledge is partitioned among different subgroups within society, seems to have been common in societies after the Neolithic revolution [38–45]; importantly, and although often less obvious to an external observer, there are clear examples of such distribution of knowledge also in hunter–gatherer societies, even though many of them are overall fairly generalist in the sense that most individuals can carry out most technological tasks [39,46–50]. An interesting example of distribution of crucially adaptive information developed among some groups of Aboriginal hunter–gatherers in Australia [51–53] regarding information about the lay of the land.…”

Section: Detailed Example 2: Songs and Oral Traditions For Navigation...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If successful establishment in a certain habitat required certain DAs, or if human populations grew to rely on DAs, extreme environmental conditions that set a low population carrying capacity might have prevented colonization for significant periods of time in certain regions such as the Siberian Arctic [61]. Alternatively, they might have allowed only certain human cultures and not others to establish in places whose colonization required passage through a population bottleneck: a population with minimal reliance on DAs may be better adapted to colonization of new regions [45].…”

Section: The Conditions In Which Distributed Adaptations Would Emerge...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The DA perspective suggests an additional factor that may have played a role: early hunter–gatherers may have been able to migrate to Australia through extreme bottlenecks without losing a substantial part of their cultural repertoire. However, if later societies that attempted to settle in Australia were reliant more heavily on DAs, for example in the form of a much larger technological toolkit and more extensive cultural knowledge to support their subsistence pattern, they would have needed to migrate in much larger numbers to be able to sustain their culture [45]. Such migration in large numbers was not feasible until the development of advanced sailing techniques in recent millennia.…”

Section: The Conditions In Which Distributed Adaptations Would Emerge...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Human major transitions from the perspective of distributed adaptations

Lamm

Finkel

Kolodny

2023

Distributed adaptations are cases in which adaptation is dependent on the population as a whole: the adaptation is conferred by a structural or compositional aspect of the population; the adaptively relevant information cannot be reduced to information possessed by a single individual. Possible examples of human-distributed adaptations are song lines, traditions, trail systems, game drive lanes and systems of water collection and irrigation. Here we discuss the possible role of distributed adaptations in human cultural macro-evolution. Several kinds of human-distributed adaptations are presented, and their evolutionary implications are highlighted. In particular, we discuss the implications of population size, density and bottlenecks on the distributed adaptations that a population may possess and how they in turn would affect the population's resilience to ecological change. We discuss the implications that distributed adaptations may have for human collective action and the possibility that they played a role in colonization of new areas and niches, in seasonal migration, and in setting constraints for minimal inter-population connectivity. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions’.

“…Data accessibility. Data and code are available from Figshare: https:// doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20180264 [57].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss

Ben-Oren

Kolodny

Creanza

2023

Self Cite

The transition to specialization of knowledge within populations could have facilitated the accumulation of cultural complexity in humans. Specialization allows populations to increase their cultural repertoire without requiring that members of that population increase their individual capacity to accumulate knowledge. However, specialization also means that domain-specific knowledge can be concentrated in small subsets of the population, making it more susceptible to loss. Here, we use a model of cultural evolution to demonstrate that specialized populations can be more sensitive to stochastic loss of knowledge than populations without subdivision of knowledge, and that demographic and environmental changes have an amplified effect on populations with knowledge specialization. Finally, we suggest that specialization can be a double-edged sword; specialized populations may have an advantage in accumulating cultural traits but may also be less likely to expand and establish themselves successfully in new demes owing to the increased cultural loss that they experience during the population bottlenecks that often characterize such expansions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions’.