ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2010
Simulating trait evolution for cross-cultural comparison.
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 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- African harps as units of cultural evolution: a cladistic analysis on their morphology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes.Frontiers in zoology · 2021Article
- The treeness of the tree of historical trees of life.PloS one · 2020Article
- Parasites and politics: why cross-cultural studies must control for relatedness, proximity and covariation.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- Article
- From cumulative cultural transmission to evidence-based medicine: evolution of medicinal plant knowledge in Southern Italy.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2015Article
- The phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood.PloS one · 2013Article
- Some structural aspects of language are more stable than others: a comparison of seven methods.PloS one · 2013Article
- The recognition signal hypothesis for the adaptive evolution of religion : a phylogenetic test with Christian denominations.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2012Article
- Correlations between genetic and behavioural dissimilarities in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) do not undermine the case for culture.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2011Article
- Article
- Genetic and 'cultural' similarity in wild chimpanzees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2011Article
- The cultural evolution of democracy: saltational changes in a political regime landscape.PloS one · 2011Article
- Phylogenetic analyses of Lapita decoration do not support branching evolution or regional population structure during colonization of Remote Oceania.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2010Article
- The cophylogeny of populations and cultures: reconstructing the evolution of Iranian tribal craft traditions using trees and jungles.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2010Article
- 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
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Cross-cultural anthropologists have increasingly used phylogenetic methods to study cultural variation. Because cultural behaviours can be transmitted horizontally among socially defined groups, however, it is important to assess whether phylogeny-based methods--which were developed to study vertically transmitted traits among biological taxa--are appropriate for studying group-level cultural variation. Here, we describe a spatially explicit simulation model that can be used to generate data with known degrees of horizontal donation. We review previous results from this model showing that horizontal transmission increases the type I error rate of phylogenetically independent contrasts in studies of correlated evolution. These conclusions apply to cases in which two traits are transmitted as a pair, but horizontal transmission may be less problematic when traits are unlinked. We also use the simulation model to investigate whether measures of homology (the consistency index and the retention index) can detect horizontal transmission of cultural traits. Higher rates of evolutionary change have a stronger depressive impact on measures of homology than higher rates of horizontal transmission; thus, low consistency or retention indices are not necessarily indicative of 'ethnogenesis'. Collectively, these studies demonstrate the importance of using simulations to assess the validity of methods in cross-cultural research.
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