Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution

Cultural commons and cultural evolution

Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary perspective, with a focus on the implications of group definition for the coexistence of different cultures. A model of cultural evolution is presented wher...

Cultural Evolution

Cultural Evolution

Our understandings of civilizations on Earth inevitably influence speculation about extraterrestrial civilizations. Specifically, our assumptions about the development of Earth’s societies continually shape our conjectures about alien societies, on topics including the probability of their existence, their possible characteristics, appropriate search strategies, and the wisdom of seeking contac...

Regulatory Traits: Cultural Influences on Cultural Evolution

We use the term regulatory traits to indicate traits that both regulate cultural transmission (e.g., from whom to learn) and are themselves culturally transmitted. In the first part of this contribution we study the dynamics of some of these traits through simple mathematical models. In particular, we consider the cultural evolution of traits that determine the propensity to copy others, the ab...

Foresight in cultural evolution

Critics of Darwinian cultural evolution frequently assert that whereas biological evolution is blind and undirected, cultural change is directed or guided by people who possess foresight, thereby invalidating any Darwinian analysis of culture. Here I show this argument to be erroneous and unsupported in several respects. First, critics commonly conflate human foresight with supernatural clairvo...