A world-wide internet survey was conducted to test central assumptions of a recent theory of cultural transmission in minorities proposed by the authors. 844 1st to 2nd generation immigrants from a wide variety of countries recruited on a microjob platform completed a questionnaire designed to test eight hypotheses derived from the theory. Support was obtained for all hypotheses. In particular,...

Our species is characterized by a great degree of cultural variation, both within and between populations. Understanding how group-level patterns of culture emerge from individual-level behaviour is a long-standing question in the biological and social sciences. We develop a simulation model capturing demographic and cultural dynamics relevant to human cultural evolution, focusing on the interf...

In recent experimental work on the emergence of novel communication systems, the cultural transmission has tended to be either horizontal or vertical. We present an experiment that integrates the two. Results show that both methods of transmission do some work.

We address the problem of cultural diversification by studying selection on cultural ideas that colonize human hosts and using diversification of religions as a conceptual example. In analogy to studying the evolution of pathogens or symbionts colonizing animal hosts, we use models for host-pathogen dynamics known from theoretical epidemiology. In these models, religious content colonizes indiv...