Cultural Evolution Workshop January 13-15, Washington University in St. Louis r  e  a  d  i  n  g  s
	NB. These all link straight to pdf or Word archives.

Robert Boyd	Boyd, R & Richerson, P. Culture, Adaptation, and Innateness. Culture profoundly alters human evolution, but not because culture is learned. Rather, culture entails a novel evolutionary tradeoff. Social learning allows human populations to accumulate reservoirs of adaptive information over many generations, leading to the cumulative cultural evolution of highly adaptive behaviors and technology. Because this process is much faster than genetic evolution, it allows human populations to evolve cultural adaptations to local environments, an ability that was a masterful adaptation to the chaotic, rapidly changing world of the Pleistocene. However, the same psychological mechanisms that create this benefit necessarily come with a built in cost. To get the benefits of social learning, humans have to be credulous, for the most part accepting the ways that they observe in their society as sensible and proper, and such credulity opens up human minds to the spread of maladaptive beliefs. This cost can be lessened by tinkering with human psychology, but it cannot be eliminated without also losing the adaptive benefits of cumulative cultural evolution.
Pascal Boyer	Boyer, P., & Lienard, P. Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals. [forthcoming Behavioral and Brain Sciences] Stereotypic, rigidly scripted behavior is found in cultural rituals, in children’s routines, in obsessive-compulsive disorder, in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle. We propose an explanation in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness, distinct from systems for manifest danger. The Precaution system includes a repertoire of potential hazards as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. Impairment in the system’s feedback accounts  for OCD rituals. Gradual calibration of this system occurs through childhood routines. Mimicry of this system’s natural input makes cultural rituals salient and compelling. Boyer, P. (2003). Religious Thought and Behavior as By-products of Brain Function, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(3). Religious concepts activate various functionally distinct mental systems, present also in non-religious contexts,and ‘tweak’ the usual inferences of these systems. They deal with detection and representation of animacy and agency, social exchange, moral intuitions, precaution against natural hazards and understanding of misfortune. Each of these activates distinct neural resources or families of networks. What makes notions of supernatural agency intuitively plausible? This article reviews evidence suggesting that it is the joint, coordinated activation of these diverse systems, a supposition that opens up the prospect of a cognitive neuroscience of religious beliefs.
Dan Fessler	Steps toward an evolutionary psychology of a culture-dependent species. TO APPEAR IN INNATENESS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE MIND, VOL. II, P. CARRUTHERS, S. LAURENCE & S. STICH, EDS., OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. Humans are at once phylogenetically linked to, and yet fundamentally different from, other primates. Most profound among these differences is the extent of our reliance on culture, by which I mean socially transmitted information shared by at least some members of the learner’s group. While recent work reveals the existence of socially transmitted foraging techniques and social behaviors in some nonhuman primates (Fragaszy and Perry, 2003; Whiten et al., 1999), compared to the human case, cultural information plays a minor role in these animals’ efforts to negotiate their physical and social environments. Highly altricial and relatively gracile, lacking large teeth, strong jaws, or claws, we are a rather unimposing mammal–our ability to exist, indeed to prosper, in nearly every ecosystem on the planet is primarily due to our capacity to acquire, employ, and elaborate on socially transmitted information. This chapter is based on the premise that these capacities reflect the workings of special-purpose psychological mechanisms that evolved in order to exploit the enormous adaptive potential of socially transmitted  information. After reviewing the principal existing approaches to this question, I outline some of the major topics that I believe need to be addressed in developing an evolutionary psychology of our uniquely culture-dependent species.
Joe Henrich	Henrich, Joe & McElreath, Richard. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Anthropology 12:123–135 (2003). Humans are unique in their range of environments and in the nature and diversity of their behavioral adaptations. While a variety of local genetic adaptations exist within our species, it seems certain that the same basic genetic endowment produces arctic foraging, tropical horticulture, and desert pastoralism, a constellation that represents a greater range of subsistence behavior than the rest of the Primate Order combined. The behavioral adaptations that explain the immense success of our species are cultural in the sense that they are transmitted among individuals by social learning and have accumulated over generations. Understanding how and when such culturally evolved adaptations arise requires understanding of both the evolution of the psychological mechanisms that underlie human social learning and the evolutionary (population) dynamics of cultural systems. Henrich, Joe & Boyd, Robert. On Modeling Cognition and Culture. Why cultural evolution does not require replication of representations. Journal of Cognition and Culture 2.2. Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of ‘representations.’ Recently, cognitive anthropologists have criticized such models. They make three points: mental representations are non-discrete, cultural transmission is highly inaccurate, and mental representations are not replicated, but rather are ‘reconstructed’ through an inferential process that is strongly affected by cognitive ‘attractors.’ They argue that it follows from these three claims that: 1) models that assume replication or replicators are inappropriate, 2) selective cultural learning cannot account for stable traditions, and 3) selective cultural learning cannot generate cumulative adaptation. Here we use three formal models to show that even if the premises of this critique are correct, the deductions that have been drawn from them are false.
Larry Hirschfeld	On a Folk Theory of Society: Children, Evolution, and Mental Representations of Social Groups Personality and Social Psychology Review 2001, Vol. 5, No. 2, 107–117. Representing and reasoning about the social universe is a major task for the young child, one that almost certainly involves specialized knowledge structures. Individuals in interaction are fundamental elements of sociality, and, unsurprisingly, evolution has prepared children with special-purpose mechanisms for drawing attention to and processing information about persons. Social aggregates are also fundamental elements of human sociality, yet we know much less about the child’s grasp of them and the institutions that mediate among them. One reason for this lacuna is that researchers have typically framed children’s social knowledge according to how adultlike (or not) that understanding is. This article proposes that it may be more productive to approach children’s social knowledge from the perspective of the child herself or himself. Arguably, even quite young children deploy lay theories of society that emerge from a special-purpose endogenous module for identifying and reasoning about human aggregates. Does the autistic child have a theory of society? Lawrence Hirschfeld, Elizabeth Bartmess, Sarah White, & Uta Frith. Social stereotypes provide a cognitively “inexpensive” if often inaccurate way to predict the behavior of others. We found that in spite of autistic children’s profound impairment in the ability to predict behavior on the basis of an individual’s mental state, they were just as likely as young normal children to use stereotypes to predict outcomes of novel situations. This finding is surprising only if one assumes that the ability to explain the behavior of others relies on a single mechanism. Our findings suggest that there are two distinct cognitive capacities, one that makes sense of others’ behavior in terms of psychological states (Theory of Mind) and another in terms of social group membership (Naive Sociology). Theory of Mind but not Naive Sociology is impaired in autism. This is a hitherto unsuspected islet of social ability in autism.
Rob Kurzban	Representational Epidemiology: Skepticism and Gullibility. Social learning, the causal process that underlies the epidemiology of representations, is unlikely to be globally skeptical or gullible because the mechanisms evolved to acquire and adopt ideas are likely to be specific to content domains. The agenda for analyzing culture then is, unfortunately, a difficult one. The underlying rules of inference that allow for others’ underlying representations to be inferred (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) as well as the subsequent rules for adopting (or not adopting) these representations must be investigated on a domain-by-domain basis.
Debra Lieberman	Lieberman, D., Tooby, J.& Cosmides, L. (2003). Does morality have a biological basis? An empirical test of the factors governing moral sentiments regarding incest. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London B, 270, 819-826. Kin-recognition systems have been hypothesized to exist in humans, and adaptively to regulate altruism and incest avoidance among close genetic kin. This latter function allows the architecture of the kin recognition system to be mapped by quantitatively matching individual variation in opposition to incest to individual variation in developmental parameters, such as family structure and co-residence patterns. Methodological difficulties that appear when subjects are asked to disclose incestuous inclinations can be circumvented by measuring their opposition to incest in third parties, i.e. morality. This method allows a direct test of Westermarck’s original hypothesis that childhood co-residence with an opposite-sex individual predicts the strength of moral sentiments regarding third-party sibling incest. Results support Westermarck’s hypothesis and the model of kin recognition that it implies. Co-residence duration objectively predicts genetic relatedness, making it a reliable cue to kinship. Co-residence duration predicts the strength of opposition to incest, even after controlling for relatedness and even when co-residing individuals are genetically unrelated. This undercuts kin-recognition models requiring matching to self (through, for example, major histocompatibility complex or phenotypic markers). Subjects’ beliefs about relatedness had no effect after controlling for co-residence, indicating that systems regulating kin-relevant behaviours are non-conscious, and calibrated by co-residence, not belief.
Pierre Lienard	Lienard, P. The making of peculiar artifacts: Living kind, artifact and social order in Turkana sacrifice. Using (linguistic, socio-cultural) data collected among the Turkana of Kenya, I investigate specific configurations of actions found in sacrifices. I argue that Turkana sacrifice has specific cognitive effects and that those can be explained in terms of the activation of specific cognitive mechanisms. Turkana sacrifice elicits assumptions about living things and artifacts. It does that in a particular way: Living kinds are used as tools and artifacts, as if endowed with an essence. The systematic combination of such manipulations with ordinary action scripts, reoriented to build ritual sequences, and the display of social orders has important effects for participants’ cognition.
Shaun Nichols	Nichols, S. Is religion what we want? Motivation and the cultural transmission of religious representations. Many psychologists and philosophers have suggested that religious ideas emerge because they are motivationally attractive.  This paper attempts to support a version of the motivational thesis by relying on religious creeds as a source of historical evidence.  This simple source of evidence indicates that the cultural evolution of religious ideas is partly a function of the motivational attractiveness of the religious ideas. Nichols, S. On the genealogy of norms: A case for the role of emotion in cultural evolution. One promising way to investigate the genealogy of norms is by considering not the origin of norms, but rather, what makes certain norms more likely to prevail.  Emotional responses, I maintain, constitute one important set of mechanisms that affects the cultural viability of norms.  To corroborate this, I exploit historical evidence indicating that 16th century etiquette norms prohibiting disgusting actions were much more likely to survive than other 16th century etiquette norms.  This case suggests more broadly that work on cultural evolution should pay greater attention to the role of emotion systems in cultural transmission.
Ara Norenzayan	Ara Norenzayan & Steven J. Heine (forthcoming). Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know? Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a  foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is  lacking. Drawing on the emerging field of cultural psychology, this article offers a conceptual  and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine universals through  empirical analysis of psychological patterns across cultures. Issues of cross cultural  generalizability of psychological processes, and three cross cultural research strategies to probe  universals, are considered. Four distinct levels of hierarchically organized universals are  possible: from strongest to weakest claims for universality, accessibility universals, functional  universals, existential universals, and non-universals. Finally, universals are examined in relation to the questions of levels of analysis, evolutionary explanations of psychological processes, and  managing cross-cultural relations.
Carlo Severi	Severi, Carlo (2004). Capturing Imagination: A Cognitive Approach to Cultural Complexity, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10, 815-838. With few exceptions, it has been assumed that the production of a generalizing anthropological theory of human cognition must necessarily entail a reduction of ethnographic complexity. No case-centred analysis has been offered to show that a cognitive approach to cultural complexity is possible. In this article, I want to show that a different cognitive perspective can improve our understanding of ethnographic facts and help us critically to revise a number of traditional anthropological concepts. In order to do so, I will discuss the example of a messianistic religious movement born among the Western Apache of San Carlos and White Mountain (Arizona).
Stephen Shennan	The spread of farming into Central Europe and its consequences: evolutionary models. In this paper I will look at two different inter-related topics that have long been of interest to archaeologists of virtually all theoretical persuasions and examine how  evolutionary theory can be used to illuminate them by presenting a specific concrete example. The two topics concern the history of human populations, the history of social institutions and the link between the two. Much less emphasis will be placed on two other types of histories for the understanding of which Darwinian theory is equally illuminating, histories of culturally transmitted norms, practices and artefact attributes, and the process of ‘niche construction’: the fact that the activities of the current generation produce outcomes, new environments, that change the selection pressures operating on subsequent ones. Random drift and culture change . Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B (2004) 271, 1443–1450. We show that the frequency distributions of cultural variants, in three different real-world examples—first names, archaeological pottery and applications for technology patents—follow power laws that can be explained by a simple model of random drift. We conclude that cultural and economic choices often reflect a decision process that is value-neutral; this result has far-reaching testable implications for social science research.
Dan Sperber	The role of attraction in cultural evolution (Reply to J. Henrich and R. Boyd, "On modeling cognition and culture". In their article, Henrich and Boyd (2002) open a serious discussion of the cognitive approach. [...] there is an important point of disagreement between Henrich and Boyd and us regarding the respective roles of attraction and selection in cultural evolution. They argue, with the use of the first model presented in their article, that, to put it succinctly, in cultural evolution, selection trumps attraction. We reply that what looks like a demonstration is in fact based on quite inadequate modeling of attraction. Sperber, D. & Claidiere, N. Defining and explaining culture (comments on Richerson and Boyd, Not by genes alone). There is much to admire in the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, and much that we agree with. In particular we share the goal of developing a “population thinking” approach to cultural evolution that sees it neither as a mere extension of biological evolution (as in pop sociobiology), nor as a mere analog of biological evolution (as in pop memetics). Not by genes alone (Richerson and Boyd 2005) provides a good overview of their contribution, and an appropriate target for discussion. Here we focus on general issues linked to their very definition of culture. Sperber, D. Why a deep understanding of cultural evolution is incompatible with shallow psychology, forthcoming in Nick Enfield and Stephen Levinson (eds.) Roots of Human Sociality. The study of cultural evolution, whether pursued by anthropologists or by evolutionary theorists is, most of the time, carried out with little or no attention to human psychology. All would agree, of course that the human mind is what makes human culture possible. Quite generally, however, the mind is seen as a mere enabler of culture, a pure opportunity with no constraints attached, nothing that might contribute to shaping, or at least to biasing cultural contents. Against this neglect of psychology, I will argue that understanding the mind is doubly important to the study of culture. Psychological considerations are crucial to a proper characterization of what is cultural. In particular, if one favors a naturalistic account of culture (as all evolutionary theorists and a few anthropologists do), then the naturalistic account of the mind that is currently developed in cognitive science should be of obvious relevance. Psychological considerations are also crucial to a proper explanation of cultural facts because psychological factors do more than enable culture, they contribute to shaping it. Sperber, Dan & Claidiere, Nicolas. Why modeling cultural evolution is still such a challenge. We believe that a proper understanding of the mechanisms of cultural propagation drawing on the work of cognitive and social scientists (see Sperber and Hirschfeld 1999 for a review) contradicts the idea that culture exhibits inheritance in the strict sense needed for the theory of evolution by natural selection to apply straightforwardly to it. If so, it will take more than adjusting  the Darwinian model to be faithful to the Darwinian inspiration.
John Tooby	Tooby, J., Cosmides, L. & Barrett, H. C. (2005). Resolving the debate on innate ideas: Learnability constraints and the evolved interpenetration of motivational and conceptual functions. In Carruthers, P., Laurence, S. & Stich, S. (Eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Content. NY: Oxford University Press. The claim is that successful performance on value-related adaptive problems poses an insurmountable ought from is learnability barrier that cannot be crossed, even in principle, by content-independent learning architectures, whatever their implementation. Given data about which valuation problems humans solve, this is a method not only for demonstrating the general case for innate ideas but also for identifying specific sets of such computational elements.
Harvey Whitehouse	The Cognitive Parsing Model: Nuclear and Global Psychological Systems in the Transmission of Culture. The ‘Cognitive Parsing Model’ (CPM) is a new method of describing and explaining culture in terms of the changing configurations of psychological mechanisms that underpin behaviour. Our larger aim to to explain various particularities of the cultural repertoire within specified populations and historical periods, thereby extending existing research in the cognitive science of culture that has focused primarily on patterns of cross-cultural recurrence. Further, the CPM holds out the promise of being able to predict cultural trends, given sufficient information on prior distributed behaviour patterns.
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