Denmark

 The terms “culture” and “cultural group” admit several readings. A prevalent one takes them to be sortals: terms that pick out countable entities. I’ll call such countable entities sortal cultures. Sortal cultural are frequently used in policy, jurisprudence, and empirical work. These are entities usually picked out with national or ethnic labels, like “the Basque” or “the Kwakwaka’waka”. Because they facilitate counting, sortals require two criteria: one for identifying the entities at stake (a criterion of application) and another that tracks their existence over time (a criterion of identity). 

Recently, philosophers have fleshed out these criteria by analogy to the phylogenetic account of species. Identifying similarities, these authors suggest sortal cultures should be underpinned by a similar metaphysical picture: relational essentialism. This, I’ll suggest, is sensible—but doesn’t fully specify the criteria needed. Further pursuing the analogy between species and culture puts pressure on current accounts, and suggests four possible routes forward: to (i) merely use the analogy instrumentally; (ii) adopt analogize a different species concept; (iii) abandon the idea that cultures are lineages, or; (iv) adopt a “rank-free” account of culture. I’ll close by highlighting the novelty—and plausibility—of (iv), that cultures should be understood as “rank-free” entities.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Cultural Lineages and Rank Freedom

philosophy; ontology of culture; metaphysics; cultural taxonomy

### Welcome to the fourth Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2022! 

As last year, Underline will support the online component of the conference. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, we seek to offer a hybrid format that will hopefully allow some folks to travel to Aarhus, others to meet up locally or regionally in CES hub-lets, and other yet to participate online. The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

##### ***For SoMe interaction and live tweeting please tag @CulturalEvolSoc and use #CESconf2022***


#### The CES 2022 local organising committee
* Luseadra Joy McKerracher
* Jesper Sørensen 
* Niels Nørkjær Johannsen 
* Benjamin Grant Purzycki 
* Mette Løvschal 
* Felix Riede
* Iza Romanowska 
* Karsten Olsen

Please click on the button bellow if you want to watch the videos

The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

technical paper

**Author(s):** Anglada-Tort, M; Harrison, P M C; Jacoby, N Introduction: 
In most human cultures, music and speech are sustained through oral transmission. How do cognitive and motor constraints in this process shape the evolution of music? Music corpus studies have been particularly useful to characterize common and diverse features observed in human songs across cultures (Mehr et al., 2019; Savage, 2015), yet these studies fail to quantify how and why these features emerge. Alternatively, iterated learning experiments provide a powerful quantitative tool for studying how transmission biases shape the evolution of language and music. However, such experiments have traditionally been conducted in nonautomated laboratory settings, making data collection costly while limiting the ability to explore the full space of evolutionary possibilities. 
 Methods: 
Here we present the first large-scale cultural evolution study on human song, quantifying the evolution of thousands of melodies transmitted orally across participants. Our method is applicable to individuals from any cultural background and works efficiently on computers available to most participants online. We perform many variations of this paradigm, including varying the total number of notes per melody (3-12 notes), adding memory load and motor constraints in the singing task, or naturalistic singing.
 Results: 
We show that cognitive and motor constraints in oral transmission play a profound role in the emergence of melodic structure. Specifically, initially random tones develop into more structured systems that increasingly reuse and combine fewer elements, making melodies easier to learn and transmit over time. Importantly, melodic features that emerged artificially from our experiments are largely consistent with melodic universals observed cross-culturally (e.g., small intervals, discrete scales, and tonal structures). Parallel to this, we find that evolving melodies tend to align with melodic pleasantness (estimated by a separate rating experiment with Western listeners) and musical exposure (estimated by a large corpus of popular Western melodies). 
Discussion: 
Taken together, our results provide the first quantitative characterization of the rich collection of biases that oral transmission imposes on music evolution, giving us a new understanding of the emergence of musical universals and the resulting vast structural diversity of human song.

Large-scale online iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission effects in the evolution of human song

Introduction
Many domains of knowledge have grappled with the arrival of hypercompetent artificial intelligence. We might expect an efflorescence of AI-produced ideas. On the other hand, human-trained AI might simply reproduce or reinforce existing orthodoxies. The strategic impact of AlphaGo post-2016 on the game of Go serves as a data-rich case study.
 Methods
Using a large database of top-level human and AI play (62,740 opening sequences, 1956-2020), I study the diversity of opening sequences using multilevel regression models of recent social and individual covariates pre & post-AlphaGo. 
Results
The post-AI era has indeed seen an explosion of move diversity (Shannon entropy on opening sequences), reversing decades of decline. Since the 1990s, social trends have come to strongly predict individual first-move openings (b=3.77, psign<0.001), and, while pre-internet Go was characterized by a low correlation between strategy popularity and efficacy (R2=0.11), the post-AI era now sees a near-perfect correlation (R2=0.87).
 Conclusions
Human Go strategies are more diverse, more social, and apparently more efficacious under the influence of hypercompetent AI advisors.

Strategic Social Leaning in the Era of Hypercompetent Artificial Intelligence: A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Case Study using the Game of Go

It has been suggested that the human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI). I argue that the ETI model is incomplete because it ignores the role of culture in human evolution. I argue that culture is not just a major force in human evolution, but the single most dominant historically. Moreover, culture appears to hold greater adaptive potential than genetic inheritance and may be driving long-term human evolution. The evolutionary impact of culture occurs mainly through culturally organized groups, which have come to dominate human affairs in recent millennia. Moreover, the role of culture appears to be growing, increasingly bypassing genetic evolution and weakening genetic adaptive potential. Taken together, these findings suggest that human long-term gene-culture coevolution is characterized by an evolutionary transition in inheritance (from genes to culture) which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group) as a consequence. I propose that human evolution is more completely characterized by an evolutionary transition in both inheritance and individuality (ETII), from the genetic evolution of individual humans to the cultural evolution of human groups. I detail predictions for the future of human evolution, and lay out an ethical strategy for research and implementation.

The role of culture in long-term human evolution

**Author(s):** Weber, T; Gerrits, L; Louçã, J Infrastructure projects like the plans to build a third runway at Munich airport are accompanied by complex public policy dynamics. The Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) would predict that policy in this case evolves in a punctuated fashion and not in smooth incremental steps. We test this for the case and complement PET with insights from a theory transfer we conducted earlier of the evolutionary theory of dissipative structures (TDS) from thermodynamics. We reconstruct the policy dynamics with qualitative content analysis of more than 700 articles from over 14 different newspapers over a period of 13 years. With our theoretical approach we identify the third runway project as a complex evolving policy system where competition between coalitions of actors and their collective understandings of the policy issue shape the structure of this system. Trust, formal and informal power are the control parameters which determine whether the coalitions are stable against deviating opinions or if these very opinions can drive the coalitions and the system to a new stable state. We have detected phases of stability interrupted by two policy punctuations in 2012 and 2018 and we can explain this evolution with a change of trust and power within the proponent coalition. The results demonstrate that a combination of TDS with policy theories can help to explain complex policy dynamics. We will continue the discussions on this with additional methods such as agent-based models.

Punctuated evolution in the complex infrastructure case of building a third runway at Munich airport – merging dissipative structures theory with public policy theories

**Author(s):** Turner, MA; Moya, C; Smaldino, PE; Jones, JH Introduction Social learning is essential to human survival–it is a critical adaptation for dealing with uncertainty. However, uncertainty takes many forms. We identified four theoretically important types of uncertainty: temporal environmental variability, ambiguous payoffs, decision set size, and effective lifespans. We used this framework to study conditions for the evolution of social learning in populations with

Different forms of uncertainty differently affect the evolution of social learning

**Author(s):** Harrison, R. A.; Restoy, S.; van de Waal, E. Introduction: The strategies guiding human social learning have been extensively studied and seem to contribute to the cumulative culture of the human species. However, relatively few studies have focused on payoff biased social learning, which leads to the adoption of the most rewarding behaviours observed. Methods: This study examined payoff bias in both children (N=107) and adults (N=100), using an instrumental task designed to resemble natural foraging problems in various species, similar to one previously used with wild vervet monkeys. Participants watched a video demonstration in which two models repeatedly retrieved either a high or low value reward from a box by opening one of two doors, before choosing which door to open themselves. Results: Our results showed that children were significantly more likely to choose the high payoff option than the low payoff option, indicating the use of payoff biased social learning, which increased over the age range tested (four to eight years old). We did not observe a payoff bias in adults, who were equally likely to choose the high and low payoff options. Discussion: This study investigated for the first time, to our knowledge, the ontogeny of payoff biased social learning in humans, using a task well-suited for comparative research. Future research will further explore the apparent lack of payoff biased learning in adults shown here.

Children but not adults demonstrate payoff biased social learning in an instrumental task

 The human propensity to detect agents, not really present around is one of the oldest problems in CESR. But is there any causal connection with uncertainty? In the study, I was inducing via sensory deprivation a specific kind of such experience, i.e., the “Unpleasant Feeling of Sensed Presence” (UFoP), using the predictive processing theory.
UFoP was induced by 0.5h sensory (visual, auditory) deprivation trial, manipulating expectations about the being that could come during the process (using semantic priming), measuring biological data (PPG, EDA), capturing experience via post-deprivation surveys and interviews, and controlling for two psychological dispositions: imaginative suggestibility and fantasy proneness.
The main predictor of UFoP experience was felt uncertainty, moderated by suggestibility (but not by fantasy proneness), while semantic priming had no effect.
In my paper, I will further discuss if – under the condition of greater uncertainty – a) humans generally tend to detect agents due to evolved hyperpriors for the agent-related fear, b) we tend to (falsely) predict the presence of other agents because agents are the main source of uncertainty in our environments.

Sensing spirits and other dangerous beings: how uncertainty makes us feel the unseen presence

 Two important hypotheses compete to explain the human adaptation. The cognitive niche hypothesis proposes that gene-based evolution in the Pleistocene favored the evolution of information rich encapsulated cognitive modules adapted to the regularities of the Pleistocene environment. The cultural niche hypothesis argues that the hallmark of Pleistocene environments was extreme variability on millennial and submillennial time scales and that culture is an adaptation this. These hypotheses have very different implications for how the human mind/brain would work. Some neurobiologists for some time have argued that the cerebral cortex has to operate as an organ of phenotypic flexibility and that genes specify, in any detail, only the ancient emotional and vegetative parts of the brain. Recent neurobiological advances support this latter picture of cortical function. The ancient but rather generalized appetites and emotions provide the selective forces on the developmental time scale that also act as forces on the cultural evolutionary time scale. These advances tend to support the cultural niche hypothesis and are not consistent with the cognitive niche alternative.

The cognitive niche versus cultural niche hypotheses: The neurobiological evidence

**Author(s):** Perret, Cedric ; Currie, Thomas Anthropologists & archaeologists have argued that the geographical distribution of resources and barriers to dispersal can affect that the degree of inequality, e.g. mountains may limit the possibility for subordinates to run away from despots. These ideas share parallels with models from evolutionary ecology, however formals models of this process have been relatively rare and the role of dispersal and migration as a levelling mechanism in human systems is still unclear. Here we describe a model based on the reproductive skew framework, and explore the concurrent evolution of inequality in many connected groups. We use both simulations and analytical approaches to examine the role of different factors.
Our results show that (i) cost of migration, even low, can lead to high inequality, (ii) migration reduces inequality not directly but by interacting with other processes affecting inequality and (iii ) that defining circumscribed groups requires careful consideration.
Finally, we discuss what these results suggest for real-world test of the territorial circumscription theory, and how they highlight the need for comprehensive models of the evolution of inequality and socio-political organization.

Modelling the role of migration and geographical distribution of resources on the evolution of inequality in socio-political systems

 Doctrinal religions have frequently been argued to underpin large-scale cooperation. Throughout their history, they have been accompanied by so-called ‘little traditions’: unorthodox religious practices and beliefs at best ignored by orthodoxy, and at worst derided as backward ‘superstitions’. Doctrine frequently claims that in contrast to orthodox ‘great traditions’, such little traditions are amoral, concerned only with the self-interested pursuit of material aims such as curing disease. This paper draws on historical sources to argue the contrary. Not only do little traditions typically carry moral concerns; they engender forms of moralising supernatural punishment (MSP) distinct from those of great traditions. Great traditions tend to propagate MSP beliefs that encourage contributions toward the extended ingroup of coreligionists. Little traditions tend to propagate beliefs enabling cooperation at a smaller scale. Having surveyed the historical evidence, the paper concludes by sketching a theoretical model of how religious traditions might coevolve by virtue of their ability to support cooperation at complementary scales.

Premium content

Cultural Lineages and Rank Freedom

Downloads

Next from Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Large-scale online iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission effects in the evolution of human song

Similar lecture

An analysis of European Late Upper Palaeolithic stone tool evolution using a Bayesian phylogenetic framework