ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Evolution of cultural traits occurs at similar relative rates in different world regions.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Socio-cultural similarity with host population rather than ecological similarity predicts success and failure of human migrations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Cultural extinction in evolutionary perspective.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- Why do religious leaders observe costly prohibitions? Examining taboos on Mentawai shamans.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Evolution within a language: environmental differences contribute to divergence of dialect groups.BMC evolutionary biology · 2018Article
- Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
- A Phylogenetic Comparative Study of Bantu Kinship Terminology Finds Limited Support for Its Co-Evolution with Social Organisation.PloS one · 2016Article
- Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
A fundamental issue in understanding human diversity is whether or not there are regular patterns and processes involved in cultural change. Theoretical and mathematical models of cultural evolution have been developed and are increasingly being used and assessed in empirical analyses. Here, we test the hypothesis that the rates of change of features of human socio-cultural organization are governed by general rules. One prediction of this hypothesis is that different cultural traits will tend to evolve at similar relative rates in different world regions, despite the unique historical backgrounds of groups inhabiting these regions. We used phylogenetic comparative methods and systematic cross-cultural data to assess how different socio-cultural traits changed in (i) island southeast Asia and the Pacific, and (ii) sub-Saharan Africa. The relative rates of change in these two regions are significantly correlated. Furthermore, cultural traits that are more directly related to external environmental conditions evolve more slowly than traits related to social structures. This is consistent with the idea that a form of purifying selection is acting with greater strength on these more environmentally linked traits. These results suggest that despite contingent historical events and the role of humans as active agents in the historical process, culture does indeed evolve in ways that can be predicted from general principles.
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