In the human sciences, cultural evolution is often viewed as an autonomous process essentially free of genetic influence. A question that follows is, If culture is not influenced by genes, can it take any path? Employing a simple mathematical model of cultural transmission in which individuals may copy each other’s traits, it can be shown that cultural evolution favors individuals who are weakl...

I investigate the structure of an argument that culture cannot be maintained in a population if each individual acquires a given cultural variant from a single person. I note two puzzling consequences of the argument: It appears to conflict with (a) many models of cultural transmission and (b) real-world cases of cultural transmission. I resolve the first puzzle by showing that one of the model...

This work aims to lay the theoretical and methodological foundations for investigating how individual level interactions aggregate to produce population level patterns of cultural diversity. Cultural traits can be transmitted between individuals in different ways. Here we investigate the dynamics produced by horizontal transmission (transmission within age groups), vertical transmission (from p...

Historical records show that culture can increase exponentially in time, e.g., in number of poems, musical works, scientific discoveries. We model how human capacities for creativity and cultural transmission may make such an increase possible, suggesting that: (1) creativity played a major role at the origin of human culture and for its accumulation throughout history, because cultural transmi...

This paper seeks answers to two questions. First, if a greater social activity of an individual enhances oblique (i.e. to non-relatives) transmission of her cultural traits at the expense of vertical (i.e. to children) transmission as well as family size, which behavior is optimal from cultural evolution standpoint? I formalize a general model that characterizes evolutionarily stable behaviors....

Human language arises from biological evolution, individual learning, and cultural transmission, but the interaction of these three processes has not been widely studied. We set out a formal framework for analyzing cultural transmission, which allows us to investigate how innate learning biases are related to universal properties of language. We show that cultural transmission can magnify weak ...

A growing body of work demonstrates that syntactic structure can evolve in populations of genetically identical agents. Traditional explanations for the emergence of syntactic structure employ an argument based on genetic evolution: Syntactic structure is specified by an innate language acquisition device (LAD). Knowledge of language is complex, yet the data available to the language learner ar...