Social network architecture and the tempo of cumulative cultural evolution

Abstract

The ability to build upon previous knowledge—cumulative cultural evolution—is a hallmark of human societies. While cumulative cultural evolution depends on the interaction between social systems, cognition and the environment, there is increasing evidence that cumulative cultural evolution is facilitated by larger and more structured societies. However, such effects may be interlinked with patterns of social wiring, thus the relative importance of social network architecture as an additional factor shaping cumulative cultural evolution remains unclear. By simulating innovation and diffusion of cultural traits in populations with stereotyped social structures, we disentangle the relative contributions of network architecture from those of population size and connectivity. We demonstrate that while more structured networks, such as those found in multilevel societies, can promote the recombination of cultural traits into high-value products, they also hinder spread and make products more likely to go extinct. We find that transmission mechanisms are therefore critical in determining the outcomes of cumulative cultural evolution. Our results highlight the complex interaction between population size, structure and transmission mechanisms, with important implications for future research.

Group size and modularity interact to shape the spread of infection and information through animal societies

“…Our results also complement recent modelling and empirical research suggesting modular networks have minimal effect on the spread of social information (Cantor et al 2021 ; Laker et al 2021 ). For example, Laker et al ( 2021 ) showed that the transmission of novel foraging information was not impacted by the modularity of network structure in domestic fowl chicks Gallus gallus domesticus .…”

The Emergence of Cultural Attractors: How Dynamic Populations of Learners Achieve Collective Cognitive Alignment

“…Complementing this work, Smolla and Akçay ( 2019) recently showed that networks and culture may co-evolve, with environments that select for specialist knowledge resulting in sparse connectivity patterns, such that individuals are repeatedly exposed to the same information and increase their depth of expertise, while environments that select for generalist knowledge result in dense connectivity patterns, for complementary reasons. Other recent results from (Cantor et al, 2021) suggest that the relationship between network structure, population size, and diffusion mechanisms are highly complex: networks that perform best in terms of cumulative cultural evolution in one context may perform worst in another.…”

Cognitive agency in sociocultural evolution

“…Sociocultural evolution is typically understood as affecting behavioral traits expressed in a human population, which we can reproduce in silico to measure their emergent effect. For example, perhaps cultural evolution can amplify small individual biases (Thompson et al, 2016), perhaps naive social learning (Henrich & Boyd, 1998) and sparse patterns of socio-cultural transmission (Cantor et al, 2021;Migliano et al, 2020) facilitate cumulative cultural evolution, or perhaps between-group conflict drives the evolution of unequal or xenophobic human groups (Makowsky & Smaldino, 2016). For the model to generate legible results, it needs to have clearly defined, easily measurable / manipulable parameters from which we can extract clear effects through statistical inference.…”