ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Evolution in leaps: The punctuated accumulation and loss of cultural innovations.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Technological complexity and combinatorial invention in small-scale societies.Science advances · 2025Article
- Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene-Culture Coevolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Mutual benefits of social learning and algorithmic mediation for cumulative culture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Weak individual preferences stabilize culture.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires.Open research Europe · 2025Article
- The refinement paradox and cumulative cultural evolution: Complex products of collective improvement favor conformist outcomes, blind copying, and hyper-credulity.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- 3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Our fragile future under the cumulative cultural evolution of two technologies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- A Simple Model of the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Generative cultural learning in children and adults: the role of compositionality and generativity in cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Modelling effects of inter-group contact on links between population size and cultural complexity.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Information Theory Opens New Dimensions in Experimental Studies of Animal Behaviour and Communication.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Human major transitions from the perspective of distributed adaptations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Pathways to cultural adaptation: the coevolution of cumulative culture and social networks.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- A description and sensitivity analysis of the ArchMatNet agent-based model.PeerJ. Computer science · 2023Article
- A cultural evolutionary theory that explains both gradual and punctuated change.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Archaeological accounts of cultural change reveal a fundamental conflict: Some suggest that change is gradual, accelerating over time, whereas others indicate that it is punctuated, with long periods of stasis interspersed by sudden gains or losses of multiple traits. Existing models of cultural evolution, inspired by models of genetic evolution, lend support to the former and do not generate trajectories that include large-scale punctuated change. We propose a simple model that can give rise to both exponential and punctuated patterns of gain and loss of cultural traits. In it, cultural innovation comprises several realistic interdependent processes that occur at different rates. The model also takes into account two properties intrinsic to cultural evolution: the differential distribution of traits among social groups and the impact of environmental change. In our model, a population may be subdivided into groups with different cultural repertoires leading to increased susceptibility to cultural loss, whereas environmental change may lead to rapid loss of traits that are not useful in a new environment. Taken together, our results suggest the usefulness of a concept of an effective cultural population size.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.