<!-- TITLE: Cultural evolution --> <!-- SUBTITLE: Evolution of culture, in concert with genes and demographics --> # Links / Resources + [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution) + [2017 PNAS article](https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7782) + [Oxford bibliography (anthro)](https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0038.xml) + [Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Ch. 7: Genes and Culture](https://wtf.tw/ref/wilson.pdf) + [Cultural Evolution: People's Motivations are Changing, and Reshaping the World](https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Evolution-Motivations-Changing-Reshaping/dp/1108489311). + Really sexy description + The data to support the relationship between material security and cultural change + Industrialization gives a new sense of security, breeding openness / libralism. + But more recently, job insecurity, inequality, and automation bring back insecurity, thus the reemergence of authoritarianism and xenophobia + [Alberto Acerbi, who got me interested again](https://twitter.com/acerbialberto), and his [book](https://twitter.com/acerbialberto/status/1202895853926715392) + Founders: [Marcus Feldman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Feldman) ([cv](http://www-evo.stanford.edu/Feldman-cv.pdf)) & [Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Luca_Cavalli-Sforza) ([nyt obit](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/obituaries/luigi-cavalli-sforza-dies.html), [stanford obit](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/09/luigi-luca-cavalli-sforza-a-giant-in-population-genetics-dies-at-96.html)) # Terms + **Niche construction** individuals modify the environment to change the fitness of certain traits, presumably increasing fitness for their own # Fun facts + If children are likely to reject a cultural trait that both of their parents possess, the frequency of that trait in the population may **oscillate between generations** (Feldman & Cavallia-Sforza 1976, cited in Creanza et al. 2017) + Cultural change, namely technological innovations, can "change the game" of cultural transmission, disrupting any potential equillibrium and making shit way more complex (Kolodny et al. 2016, cited in Creanza et al. 2017) + Production of lactose enzymes in adulthood were selected for in response to the cultural practice of domestication of cattle. (Feldman & Cavalli-Sforza 1989, cited in Creanza et al. 2017) + Assortative mating is culturally heterogeneous, and generally important to models of cultural evolution (Creanza et al. 2017, Nonrandom Assortment and Biased Transmission) + Novelty bias and conformity bias work together to produce dramatic logistic trends in things like baby names, career choices, and fashion trends (Creanza et al. 2017) + The demographic transition in postindustrialized countries is a "paradox", because species should want to procreate more, not less. (Creanza et al. 2017) + Genetic evidence indicates that farmers *replaced* hunter-gatherers during the [Neolithic revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution), it wasn't a diffusion of practices (Skoglund et al. 2012). Same with the horse-riding Russians in the Bronze age taking over (Allentoft et al. 2015) + Selective mating based on culturally transmitted preferences for bird songs accellerates speciation (Lachlan & Servedio 2004) and affects evolution of neural underpinnings of learning (Creanza et al. 2016) # Bibliography + Cavalli-Sforza LL, Feldman MW (1981) **Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach** (Princeton Univ Press, Princeton). + Boyd R, Richerson PJ (1985) **Culture and the Evolutionary Process** (Chicago Univ Press, Chicago). + Mesoudi A (2017) **Pursuing Darwin’s curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution**. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 114:7853–7860. + Feldman MW, Cavalli-Sforza LL (1976) **Cultural and biological evolutionary processes, selection for a trait under complex transmission**. Theor Popul Biol 9:238–259. + Cavalli-Sforza LL, Feldman MW (1973) **Cultural versus biological inheritance: Phenotypic transmission from parents to children**. (A theory of the effect of parental phenotypes on children’s phenotypes). Am J Hum Genet 25:618–637. + Henrich J (2004) **Demography and cultural evolution: How adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses—The Tasmanian case**. Am Antiq 69:197–214. + Creanza, N., Kolodny, O., & Feldman, M. W. (2017). **Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters**. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(30), 7782 LP – 7789. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1620732114 + Aoki K, Wakano J, Feldman M (2005) **The emergence of social learning in a temporally changing environment: A theoretical model**. Curr Anthropol 46:334–340. + Enquist M, Ghirlanda S, Jarrick A, Wachtmeister C-A (2008) **Why does human culture increase exponentially?** Theor Popul Biol 74:46–55. + Fogarty L, Creanza N, Feldman MW (2015) **Cultural evolutionary perspectives on creativity and human innovation.** Trends Ecol Evol 30:736–754. + Klein RG, Edgar B (2002) **The Dawn of Human Culture** (Wiley, New York). + Kolodny O, Creanza N, Feldman MW (2015) **Evolution in leaps: The punctuated accumulation and loss of cultural innovations**. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112:E6762–E6769. + Kolodny O, Creanza N, Feldman MW (2016) **Game-changing innovations: How culture can change the parameters of its own evolution and induce abrupt cultural shifts**. PLOS Comput Biol 12:e1005302. + Crema ER, Kandler A, Shennan S (2016) **Revealing patterns of cultural transmission from frequency data: Equilibrium and non-equilibrium assumptions**. Sci Rep 6:39122. + Feldman MW, Laland KN (1996) **Gene-culture coevolutionary theory.** Trends Ecol Evol 11:453–457. + Chudek M, Henrich J (2011) **Culture-gene coevolution, norm-psychology and the emergence of human prosociality.** + Mesoudi A, Whiten A, Laland KN (2006) **Towards a unified science of cultural evolution.** Behav Brain Sci 29:329–347, discussion 347–383. + Feldman MW, Cavalli-Sforza LL (1989) **On the theory of evolution under genetic and cultural transmission with application to the lactose absorption.** Mathematical Evolutionary Theory, ed Feldman MW (Princeton Univ Press, Princeton), pp 145–173. + Ihara Y, Feldman MW (2004) **Cultural niche construction and the evolution of small family size.** Theor Popul Biol 65:105–111. + Skoglund P, et al. (2012) **Origins and genetic legacy of Neolithic farmers and hunter-gatherers in Europe.** Science 336:466–469. + Allentoft ME, et al. (2015) **Population genomics of bronze age Eurasia.** Nature 522:167–172. + Boni MF, Feldman MW (2005) **Evolution of antibiotic resistance by human and bacterial niche construction. **Evolution 59:477–491. + Lachlan RF, Servedio MR (2004) **Song learning accelerates allopatric speciation.** Evolution 58:2049–2063. + Creanza N, Fogarty L, Feldman MW (2016) **Cultural niche construction of repertoire size and learning strategies in songbirds.** Evol Ecol 30:285–305.