Cultural evolution from the producers' standpoint

The Agential View of Misfortune

In many traditional, small-scale societies, death and other misfortunes are commonly explained as a result of others' malign occult agency. Here, we call this family of epistemic tendencies "the agential view of misfortune." After reviewing several ethnographic case studies that illustrate this view, we argue that its origins and stability are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Not only is the agential view of misfortune false; it imposes costs on individuals and social groups that seem to far outweigh whatever benefits the view might provide. We thus doubt that the agential view of misfortune is explainable in terms of adaptive effects. However, neither does it seem readily explainable as a consequence of belief formation strategies that are on the whole adaptive (as is plausibly the case for certain other of our false beliefs, including some that are costly). Accordingly, we contend that the commonness of the agential view of misfortune demands a special evolutionary explanation of some kind. We provide a partial explanation of this phenomenon by highlighting the adaptive benefits that often flow to occult specialists in environments where the agential view of misfortune is entrenched. What this does not explain, however, is the general lack of resistance we observe in response to occultists' exploitative behaviours over (cultural) evolutionary timescales. We conclude by canvassing a few possible explanations for this puzzling lack of resistance, and while we commit ourselves to none, we do find one option more promising than the others.

Modelling the structure and evolution of cultural information as quasispecies

We present a novel mode of cultural evolution whereby some forms of transmission may be modelled as quasispecies. The model incorporates the effect of high rates of error in certain forms of communication; while also building on the structural similarities between biological molecules and written language. Firstly, both written language and key biological molecules, such as RNA and proteins, are modular. Within these molecules, structural domains may be recombined, while retaining their function. Likewise, sentences are structured as combinations of clauses, in which each clause contains a domain of information. The clausal structure permits the recombination of information to adopt different meanings, while allowing each unit to retain its identity. Secondly, by virtue of intrinsically-high error rates, we show that some, but not all, aspects of communicated culture information exists as rapidly evolving clouds within the population. These clouds of cultural information behave as quasispecies, which we model with varying mutation rates and suitable selection coefficients. We then integrate these ideas with the application of Shannon Diversity Index to produce a more holistic view of culture that is centred on the evolution of its information. Re-imagining culture, as evolving clouds of information, unifies the mode in which information is stored culturally and biologically, and opens up new avenues of comparative analysis.