ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Culture shapes the evolution of cognition.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed.
- Moral stereotyping in large language models.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Analogies evolve by increasing transmission fidelity in the communication of complex information.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Norms emerge through iterated learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Living on the edge: the evolution of spatial cognition in food-caching chickadees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Biases, evolutionary mismatch and the comparative analysis of human versus artificial cognition: a comment on Macmillan-Scott and Musolesi (2024).Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Cultural bias and cultural alignment of large language models.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Cellular Competency during Development Alters Evolutionary Dynamics in an Artificial Embryogeny Model.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- From evolutionary ecosystem simulations to computational models of human behavior.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
- Different models of anthropomorphism across cultures and ontological limits in current frameworks the integrative framework of anthropomorphism.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2022Article
- Words with Consistent Diachronic Usage Patterns are Learned Earlier: A Computational Analysis Using Temporally Aligned Word Embeddings.Cognitive science · 2021Article
- Human biases limit cumulative innovation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Iconicity in Word Learning and Beyond: A Critical Review.Language and speech · 2021Review
- Prestige and content biases together shape the cultural transmission of narratives.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Culture without copying or selection.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- How Culture and Biology Interact to Shape Language and the Language Faculty.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
- Evolutionary Dynamics Do Not Motivate a Single-Mutant Theory of Human Language.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Constructing a Consensus on Language Evolution? Convergences and Differences Between Biolinguistic and Usage-Based Approaches.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A central debate in cognitive science concerns the nativist hypothesis, the proposal that universal features of behavior reflect a biologically determined cognitive substrate: For example, linguistic nativism proposes a domain-specific faculty of language that strongly constrains which languages can be learned. An evolutionary stance appears to provide support for linguistic nativism, because coordinated constraints on variation may facilitate communication and therefore be adaptive. However, language, like many other human behaviors, is underpinned by social learning and cultural transmission alongside biological evolution. We set out two models of these interactions, which show how culture can facilitate rapid biological adaptation yet rule out strong nativization. The amplifying effects of culture can allow weak cognitive biases to have significant population-level consequences, radically increasing the evolvability of weak, defeasible inductive biases; however, the emergence of a strong cultural universal does not imply, nor lead to, nor require, strong innate constraints. From this we must conclude, on evolutionary grounds, that the strong nativist hypothesis for language is false. More generally, because such reciprocal interactions between cultural and biological evolution are not limited to language, nativist explanations for many behaviors should be reconsidered: Evolutionary reasoning shows how we can have cognitively driven behavioral universals and yet extreme plasticity at the level of the individual-if, and only if, we account for the human capacity to transmit knowledge culturally. Wherever culture is involved, weak cognitive biases rather than strong innate constraints should be the default assumption.
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