In this chapter, I explore the integration of imitative and creative aspects of children’s autonomous play as a means of examining the evolved psychology for learning within a culturally constructed niche. I investigate whether children’s play tracks expected pathways of cultural transmission across a small sample of foraging and agrarian societies, and what the settings of Aka forager and Ngan...

In this paper I discuss the role and sources of innovation in generating culture, and also the role of modularity in preserving it. I also discuss the extent to which biological selection can underly cultural evolution and the interaction between these. Finally I present two sets of pilot experiments mostly as ‘intuition pumps’ to explore the problem of cultural stability and change. The first ...

Computational simulations of natural selection for communicative success show that natural selection alone is capable of evolving optimal communication systems. Simulations of the interactions between natural selection and learning show that the biases of learners, when placed in the framework of iterated cultural transmission of communication systems, result in cultural selection of communicat...

As in biological evolution, multiple forces are involved in cultural evolution. One force is analogous to selection, and acts on differences in the fitness of aspects of culture by influencing who people choose to learn from. Another force is analogous to mutation, and influences how culture changes over time owing to errors in learning and the effects of cognitive biases. Which of these forces...

An anti-capitalist cultural bias, through directed within-family human capital transmission, adversely affects the supply of entrepreneurial talent and risk-taking. This limits economic progress if aggregate productivity is low. When productivity is high, economic incentives can overcome cultural inertia. Though the income level depends on culture, the growth rate in this case does not. JEL Cod...

Richerson et al. establish cultural group selection as a plausible force in human social evolution. However, they do not demonstrate its causal precedence for any trait, let alone its "essentialness." To do so, they must show that a particular group trait was caused by cultural transmission, and directly caused differences in group fitness.

This research examines the impact of digitized and digital indigenous knowledge collections (D-IKC) on cultural transmission, social connections, identity through semi-structured interviews with 8 users D-IKC in New Zealand. The participants acknowledged that brought about many benefits, including surfacing otherwise hidden or inaccessible heritage. Concerns around access, competency, responsiv...

It has been suggested that human language emerged as a function of three adaptive processes: evolution by natural selection, individual learning, and cultural evolution (Kirby & Hurford, 2002). In this paradigm, biological evolution is intrinsically difficult to explore due to the ephemeral nature of language; however, the interface between learning and cultural evolution has been tested in a v...