Denmark

Human culture, despite its immense complexity, is often reduced to fit into a particular framework when studied quantitatively. We know, thanks to the number of studies to date, that people select among the available variants while modifying them during transmission. We also know that different biases play a role in this process. We set out to combine existing approaches into a single mathematical model and determine the extent to which they affect cultural transmission. Our main objective is to estimate parameter values in a continuous cultural inheritance model that considers the proportionality in variance between cultural parents and offspring while taking factors such as conformity bias or cultural attraction into consideration. This poster introduces the data collection app, styled as a simple transmission-chain quiz game. While answering the questions, participants are presented with tips of previous players as hints. We are able to modify the transmission parameters (e.g. selection pressure on tips in each generation or diversity of tips presented to the first generation of participants), which allows us to reliably parametrize the process of cultural transmission.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Tip for Science: New app lets you study cultural transmission of continuous traits

cultural inheritance; cultural transmission; social learning; cognitive biases; cultural attraction

Welcome to the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) Conference 2024, which was a hybrid conference held at Durham University (UK). The conference was hosted in Durham by the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) with administrative assistance from the CES Transformation Fund team.

**For more information about the CES Conference, please visit the [CES Website Home Page](https://ces2024.webspace.durham.ac.uk/).**

#### Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) 
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**Interdisciplinary study of cultural change and diversity**

We are a highly interdisciplinary group of researchers using evolutionary models to study cultural change and diversity. We apply cultural evolutionary methods to a wide variety of topics including cognition, innovation, social learning, technology, art, music, narrative, religion, sociality, language and communication. We have a growing interest in applying cultural evolutionary theory to current societal challenges such as understanding the spread of prosocial health behaviours and health conspiracies. 
**[Discover More](https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/cultural-evolution/)**

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Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

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.

poster

### 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

Introduction: The observation that child-directed speech (CDS) benefits language learning has been taken to suggest that this register is part of natural pedagogy – a suite of evolved pro-social communicative behaviours that use ostension to teach culturally relevant knowledge. While prosodic features of CDS appear universal, phonetic, morphosyntactic and lexical features tend to vary cross-linguistically. I argue that (a) this variation in CDS reflects different solutions to trade-offs between affective bonding and teaching, based on specific linguistic affordances and cultural constraints, and that (b) the way didactic features are incorporated into CDS is itself acquired and transmitted. Evidence: Preliminary evidence comes from (a) comparisons of acted vs spontaneous CDS, where positive affect expression can render the latter suboptimal for language learning, (b) CDS of proficient L2-speakers which lacks some features of native CDS and (c) iterated language learning experiments in which learners who subsequently teach change transmission. Further evidence should come from tracing changes in teaching efficiency during cultural transmission under social vs asocial learning conditions. Discussion: CDS may be a special case of conventionalisation of didactic features which can themselves be learned thereby reducing the individual cost of prosocial behaviours like teaching.

Learning to Transmit: The Acquired Nature of Child-Directed Speech

 This presentation examines the transplant of the legal doctrine of assignment of contract in the Japanese legal system as a case of cultural evolution. Its main objective is to examine how the existing legal literature on legal transplants can be re-evaluated in the theoretical framework of cultural evolution. This presentation will be mainly based on qualitative analysis of legal and doctrinal sources of the legal systems involved, and on a general review of the comparative legal scholarship on legal transplants and legal evolution. This presentation rejects an essentialist vision of legal culture, according to which legal evolution occurs only in stages and legal transplants can happen only between legal cultures which share a common tradition. Instead, this presentation shows that legal transplants are possible despite hurdles such as differences in language, culture and geography. It also reveals that legal transplants involving highly technical legal doctrines without political coloration, such as the doctrine of assignment of contract, can occur without any decisive relationship to legal culture. Based on these findings, this presentation strongly suggests that legal transplants should be studied as typical cases of cultural evolution.

Legal Transplants as Cultural Evolution: The Doctrine of Assignment of Contract in Italy and Japan

 Conflict is a persistent feature of primate societies. Although sociability has valuable benefits, such as protection against predators or access to resources, maintaining peaceful relationships with other group members can be costly for individuals. Conflict episodes within a social group promote physical contact and changes in social dynamics. All social animals engage in episodes of conflict and aggression for dominance, control of resources, food, sexual partners, or territories. To restore social balance, primates display appeasement gestures that may repair relationships after fights. One way to restore harmony after is through sexual behavior. Non-conceptive sexual behaviors have been described in most primate species. These are explained by its communicative or sociosexual functions, which include tension regulation, dominance signaling, ties strengthening, and reconciliation among others. In this study, we systematically reviewed literature on primate conflict and resolution to determine how frequently sexual behavior has appeasing function. Results showed that closely related species like bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (P. troglodytes) routinely use sexual behavior for conflict resolution. However, it is still necessary to investigate reconciliatory sexual behavior in other primate species.

Make love, not war: Conflict and sexual reconciliation in primates

Archaeological and anthropological research on war has linked the taking of human body parts as trophies with transitions to sedentism, farming, and political centralization: trophies could increase status of warriors in societies with achieved inequality, project political power for leaders relying on violent coercion of internal and external populations, and were often linked with beliefs about agricultural fertility. This study tests whether institutionalized trophy-taking in war was more likely in societies 1) at intermediate levels of social complexity, 2) engaging in violent political expansion, and 3) dependent on agriculture. A dataset of 113 societies was coded from ethnographic and secondary historical/archaeological sources. Bayesian logistic regressions were used to test the likelihood of trophy-taking from the predictors, using a DAG to adjust for appropriate covariates. None of the hypotheses was supported. There was some evidence for a negative effect of social complexity (95% CI largely negative across models). This could be interpreted as less display-oriented violence in complex societies reliant on more egalitarian/cooperative ideologies. It is also possible the sample or coding was biased, such as with the measurement of social complexity, or that trophy-taking is too broad a phenomenon to be consistently associated with any of the hypothesized drivers.

A cross-cultural analysis of social complexity and the taking of human body parts as trophies during war

Introduction. This poster celebrates advances in the study of culture in non-human taxa indexed by articles appearing in the two highest profile science journals. The present century has witnessed a remarkable surge in the quality and quantity of these studies and their reception in such journals. Approach. Titles of articles on animal culture together with brief abstracts and key illustrations extracted from Nature and Science are displayed, to illustrate the range of taxa and cultural phenomena addressed. Findings. Twenty titles are available in the present century alone, a majority from just the last decade. Reports of culture cover an expanding range of species including primates, cetaceans, birds and insects. Behavioural domains are no less diverse, from mate choice to foraging techniques, vocal repertoires and migration routes. Evidence extends to gene-culture co-evolution. Implications for conservation are now under review by IUCN and UN. Conclusions. The studies collated here index the growing recognition that cultural phenomena are widespread in animals. They provide a robust and exciting platform from which to further explore the scope of culture in non-human species.

Animal Culture Studies Advance in the Pages of Nature and Science

Social primates exhibit a vast behavioural and cultural repertoire. Understanding the ontogeny of sociability in primates can bring important findings in comparative studies between human and non-human cultures. In this context, our objective was to analyse the development of the social personality of 12 wild capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus) and test if sex and monkey identity affected the social personality. We used videos recorded in the wild during the first 3 years of life of 6 males and 6 females and analysed the rate of emission of affiliative social behaviours, such as grooming, lipsmacking and others. We used GLMMs and tested the repeatability of behaviours for statistical analysis. The results showed low repeatability for monkey identity and sex as random effects The population exhibited high values of inter and intraindividual variance in the emission of behaviours, especially during the first year and a half of life, that is the infancy of S. libidinosus. The repeatability values stabilised in the juvenile period, but remained low. Our results show that social personality is not yet established in the first three years of life for these primates. Longitudinal studies following the individuals until adulthood are necessary to understand if and when personality is consolidated in capuchin monkeys.

The development of social personality in a wild neotropical primate

Religious sermons reinforce and transform the ideas and values of local communities. Prior work indicates sermons serve important functions for individuals and groups, but many key questions could not be addressed due to limited corpus size. The present research uses natural language processing on a corpus of 50,000 geo-tagged sermons from five Christian denominations delivered between 2019-2020 in the United States. We aim to understand how sermon content is associated with—and affected by—socio-ecological context. This requires two main analyses. First, accounting for spatial autocorrelation, we correlate sermon content with state-level variables, including tightness, political orientation, and prevalence of natural disasters. Second, we use event-based analyses to examine how local sermon content is influenced by natural and man-made disasters. Preliminary analyses indicate our analyses are feasible: Sermons are distributed sufficiently across states, and we have quantified the prevalence of psychologically relevant topics in each sermon. We await the results of our main analyses. It is now easy to utilize rich data sources, like transcripts, that directly capture phenomena of interest. Religious sermons are an untapped data source for scholars to examine how religious institutions transmit culture and interact with the socio-ecological environment.

How religious sermon content is associated with—and affected by—socio-ecological context: Analyzing 50,000 American sermon transcripts from 2019-2020

Introduction: Music and language are both found in all societies. But did humans evolve to make music, or is our musicality a byproduct of language evolution? Surprisingly, there remains little data on which aspects of music and language are shared or distinct across cultures, due to the limitations of automated acoustic analysis and the lack of cross-cultural datasets with human annotations. Approach: We combined objective acoustic analysis with subjective speaker annotations to compare recordings of singing, lyrics recitation, spoken description of the song, and the instrumental version across diverse languages. Findings: Pilot analyses of recordings in five languages (Japanese, English, Yoruba, Farsi, and Marathi) suggest that tempo is the feature that most strongly differentiates speech and song (song is slower), while melodic interval is most similar (both speech and song are characterized by small intervals <700 cents). Discussion: We will use a Registered Report framework to rigorously test candidate features on a sample of over 50 languages, revealing cross-culturally shared and distinct features of speech and song, and shedding light on the evolution of language and music.

Similarities and differences in a cross-linguistic sample of song and speech recordings

People are generally biased toward hearing and producing rhythms composed of simple integer ratios. However, the preference for specific rhythm structure is also significantly modulated by experience and differs across cultures (Jacoby and McDermott 2017). The role played by distinct musical experiences in developing the specific rhythmical categories remains unclear.
To address this issue we conducted a study on haptic rhythm reproduction on congenitally deaf people, that is, a population which has never have been exposed to auditory music. 20 congenitally deaf subjects (aged 18-40) participated in an experiment based on a haptic version of the iterating learning rhythm procedure(Jacoby and McDermott 2017) The rhythmical sequences were presented on the participants’ torso using a haptic strap, and subjects were asked to reproduce rhythmical sequences by tapping synchronously along with the stimuli. Each participant’s reproduction of a rhythm provided the seed for the next rhythm iteration, so that perceptual priors could be estimated.
Surprisingly, we found that the deaf individuals have rhythmic categories that are similar to those revealed in previous studies on auditory rhythm in the general population. Like hearing populations, deaf subjects exhibit a tendency toward integer ratio rhythms. Comparing to hearing US subjects, they also tended to have significantly more of the simple categories (such as 1:1:1 ratio), and significantly less complex rhythms categories (i.e.1:2:3 ratio).
Our results show that perceptual priors for specific rhythms can be developed independently of auditory and musical exposure.

Rhythm categories without auditory experience? Perceptual priors reveal by haptic rhythm reproduction in the congenitally deaf subjects.

Previous research suggested changes in anxiety and mood connected with fluctuations of progesterone during menstrual cycle. These fluctuations could in turn lead to behavioral patterns connected to heightened states of anxiety. For example, in humans and non-human animals, ritualized behavior has been linked to states of intense stress and anxiety in a range of studies. In a pre-registered (osf.io/fq7sm) longitudinal study (36 days), free-cycling female participants regularly marked their day of the cycle, symptoms connected with the menstrual cycle, levels of anxiety, and activities they performed. These activities were evaluated by independent coders on the characteristics of ritualized behavior. The main prediction of the study were that psychological changes, specifically heightened anxiety, and perceived stress during the luteal phase, would lead to both an increase in the types of ritualized behaviors and higher intensity of those behaviors. We have not observed any differences in anxiety or stress between luteal and follicular phases, but higher anxiety (independent from phase) was positively correlated with more ritualized behaviors.

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