ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Innovation in the collective brain.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 64 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
64 citing papers in PubMed.
- Three centuries of technological innovation: Opportunity is the mother of invention.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Identifying the necessary conditions for large populations to enhance cumulative culture.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The convergence paradox: a constructivist account of perceived template convergence and originative agency under generative artificial intelligence.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Higher-order interactions shape collective human behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Time in mind: a multidisciplinary review on temporal perception, cognition, and memory.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Review
- Chimpanzees employ context-specific behavioral strategies within fission-fusion societies.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- The refinement paradox and cumulative cultural evolution: Complex products of collective improvement favor conformist outcomes, blind copying, and hyper-credulity.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Prestige bias in cultural evolutionary dynamics.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Orangutan males make increased use of social learning opportunities, when resource availability is high.iScience · 2024Article
- Expanding the causal menu: An interventionist perspective on explaining human behavioural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Socio-cultural brain reprogramming-The uniqueness of human cognition.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas.Nature · 2023Article
- The experimental evolution of human culture: flexibility, fidelity and environmental instability.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Biological adaptations for cultural transmission?Biology letters · 2022Review
- Problem-solving in groups of common marmosets (PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Hybrid social learning in human-algorithm cultural transmission.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- The spread of technological innovations: effects of psychology, culture and policy interventions.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
4 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Innovation is often assumed to be the work of a talented few, whose products are passed on to the masses. Here, we argue that innovations are instead an emergent property of our species' cultural learning abilities, applied within our societies and social networks. Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. We outline how many human brains, which evolved primarily for the acquisition of culture, together beget a collective brain. Within these collective brains, the three main sources of innovation are serendipity, recombination and incremental improvement. We argue that rates of innovation are heavily influenced by (i) sociality, (ii) transmission fidelity, and (iii) cultural variance. We discuss some of the forces that affect these factors. These factors can also shape each other. For example, we provide preliminary evidence that transmission efficiency is affected by sociality--languages with more speakers are more efficient. We argue that collective brains can make each of their constituent cultural brains more innovative. This perspective sheds light on traits, such as IQ, that have been implicated in innovation. A collective brain perspective can help us understand otherwise puzzling findings in the IQ literature, including group differences, heritability differences and the dramatic increase in IQ test scores over time.
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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.