Slowing life history (K) can account for increasing micro-innovation rates and GDP growth, but not macro-innovation rates, which declined following the end of the Industrial Revolution

Abstract

Baumard proposes that life history slowing in populations over time is the principal driver of innovation rates. We show that this is only true of micro-innovation rates, which reflect cognitive and economic specialization as an adaptation to high population density, and not macro-innovation rates, which relate more to a population's level of general intelligence.

Moral foundations tracked over 200 years of lexicographic data, and their predictors

“…Further, the measurement model for the latent structure of Asabiyyah was not meaningfully confounded by temporal autocorrelations, which were found to be of negligible magnitudes, nor were the lexicographically convergent results confounded with the age of the words sampled, which is significant as age has been found in previous work on Ngram viewer to be a significant predictor of temporal changes in the utilization frequencies of words (Woodley of Menie et al 2015). The developmental instability factor may therefore capture changes in the strength of negative selection on indicators that may serve as proxy measures of disturbed patterns of social epistasis.…”

“…MLM4 involved the estimation of separate word-specific logarithmic slopes and intercepts over time. All MLMs were statistically controlled for the effects of the year of FirstUse recorded for each word in the analyses; this is an important control, as it has been found that older words tend to be better known to users of texts as a result of the lag between changes in spoken and written texts (Curzan 2009;Woodley of Menie et al 2015); LNT is the natural logarithmic function of time.…”

“…Just as Dawkins (1981) took the opportunity to oppose in print this misuse of his concept, we, too, take this opportunity to state our opposition to the casual (mis)labeling of people as "spiteful mutants" for abusive and other objectionable purposes. All uses here of the term spiteful mutations (and associated terms and concepts), as in related scientific literature, are meant to be purely descriptive of biological and psychological phenomena in humans and nonhuman animals (Woodley of Menie et al 2017a;Woodley of Menie et al 2020).…”

“…2 Woodley of Menie et al (2020) found that advanced paternal age (a strong proxy for de novo mutation load in offspring), net of covariates, is a negative predictor of church attendance in U.S. cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s, but not among those born in the 1930s and 1940s. One interpretation of this finding is that the accumulation of prospectively spiteful mutations has undermined group-oriented cultural adaptations (such as religious ritual) possibly by promoting attrition.…”