ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2010
Cultural traits as units of analysis.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 117 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social dynamics signals in archaeological time-series: How cultural transmission and production biases shape assemblage diversity.PloS one · 2026Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A macroevolutionary analysis of European Late Upper Palaeolithic stone tool shape using a Bayesian phylodynamic framework.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Evaluating the relative contributions of copying and reconstruction processes in cultural transmission episodes.PloS one · 2021Article
- Culture without copying or selection.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- The spread of agriculture in Iberia through Approximate Bayesian Computation and Neolithic projectile tools.PloS one · 2021Article
- Epistasis between cultural traits causes paradigm shifts in cultural evolution.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Origins and spread of fluted-point technology in the Canadian Ice-Free Corridor and eastern Beringia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Evolutionary ethnobiology and cultural evolution: opportunities for research and dialog.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2018Review
- Young children copy cumulative technological design in the absence of action information.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Social Value Orientation and Capitalism in Societies.PloS one · 2016Article
- Evolution in leaps: The punctuated accumulation and loss of cultural innovations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- From cumulative cultural transmission to evidence-based medicine: evolution of medicinal plant knowledge in Southern Italy.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2015Article
- Article
- Untangling cultural inheritance: language diversity and long-house architecture on the Pacific northwest coast.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2010Article
- Evolutionary approaches to cultural and linguistic diversity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2010Article
- If we are all cultural Darwinians what's the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.Biology & philosophyArticle
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cultural traits have long been used in anthropology as units of transmission that ostensibly reflect behavioural characteristics of the individuals or groups exhibiting the traits. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of an individual's cultural repertoire through processes such as recombination, loss or partial alteration within an individual's mind. Cultural traits are analogous to genes in that organisms replicate them, but they are also replicators in their own right. No one has ever seen a unit of transmission, either behavioural or genetic, although we can observe the effects of transmission. Fortunately, such units are manifest in artefacts, features and other components of the archaeological record, and they serve as proxies for studying the transmission (and modification) of cultural traits, provided there is analytical clarity over how to define and measure the units that underlie this inheritance process.
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