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Fidelity and the Speed of the Treadmill: The Combined Impact of Population Size, Transmission Fidelity, and Selection on the Accumulation of Cultural Complexity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Claes Andersson  and
Petter Törnberg
Claes Andersson*
Affiliation:
Division for Physical Resource Theory, Department of Energy and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
Petter Törnberg
Affiliation:
Division for Physical Resource Theory, Department of Energy and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
*
(claeand@chalmers.se, corresponding author)
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Abstract

Human culture signifies the emergence of an entirely new domain of existence: an event in natural history that is paralleled only by the Cambrian Explosion in terms of creativity and scope. The question of how human culture—as opposed to its animal counterparts—came to become open-endedly creative and cumulative is therefore one of wide and general scientific importance. Several causal factors have been proposed to date to explain this unique quality, including population size, transmission fidelity, pedagogy, and creativity. Inquiries, however, tend to focus exclusively on one factor at a time, leaving us blind to important issues regarding their relative roles and combined action. We here combine two models, one focusing on population size and the other on imitation fidelity, as constraints and enablers of evolutionary cumulativity. We explore how these factors interact to promote and inhibit evolutionary cumulativity and how the synthetic model compares to the original models individually and to empirical and experimental data. We report several findings that do not emerge in the models that we combine individually. For example, group size is found to be important for small but not for larger groups, an observation that moreover substantially improves agreement with data.

La cultura humana significa la aparición de un dominio de la existencia completamente nuevo: un acontecimiento en la historia natural sólo equivalente a la explosión cámbrica en términos de creatividad y alcance. La cuestión de cómo la cultura humana –a diferencia de sus equivalencias entre los animales –se convirtió en creativa y acumulativa se convierte por lo tanto en un tema de importancia científica amplia y general. Hasta la fecha se han propuesto varios factores causales para explicar esta cualidad única, incluyendo el tamaño de la población, la fidelidad de la transmisión, la pedagogía y la creatividad. Las investigaciones, sin embargo, tienden a centrarse exclusivamente en uno de estos factores a la vez, lo que nos deja ciegos a cuestiones importantes con respecto a sus roles relativos y a su interacción. En esta investigación combinamos dos de estos modelos, uno que se centra en el tamaño de la población y el otro en la fidelidad de imitación como restricciones y facilitadores de la acumulación evolutiva. Exploramos también cómo estos factores interactúan para promover e inhibir dicha acumulación evolutiva, cómo el modelo sintético se compara con los modelos originales de forma individual y con datos empíricos y experimentales. Presentamos varios hallazgos que no surgen en los modelos que combinamos de forma individual. Por ejemplo, se encuentra que el tamaño del grupo es importante para grupos pequeños pero no para los grupos más grandes; observación que, además, mejora sustancialmente la concordancia con los datos.

Type
Reports
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 576 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 2016 

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References

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