ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 91 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
91 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- An Evaluation of Cross-Cultural Adaptations of Social Cognition Testing: A Systematic Review.Neuropsychology review · 2024Pooled it
- Article
- The evolution of the concepts of 'primate culture' in Western science.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Review
- Generalized Stable Population and Agent-Based Models of Phenotypic Transmission in Human Populations, with an Application to Body Size.Human heredity · 2026Article
- The Evolutionary Misfit: Evolution, Epigenetics, and the Rise of Non-Communicable Diseases.Epigenomes · 2025Review
- Archaic humans in the Middle Palaeolithic Levant conducted planned and selective intercepts of aurochs, but not mass hunting.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Collective cooperative intelligence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Mechanisms of cultural diversity in urban populations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Decoding the Dynamics of Cultural Change: A Cultural Evolution Approach to the Psychology of Acculturation.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2025Review
- A complex adaptive systems model of labour reciprocity and normative reasoning in swidden agriculture.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Cultural processes and demography: implications for conservation and beyond.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Pathogen stress heightens sensorimotor dimensions in the human collective semantic space.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Prestige and gender role ideology: a study of young Tanzanian men.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- African harps as units of cultural evolution: a cladistic analysis on their morphology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Is Culture Learned? The Neglected Role of Evoking Events.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Review
- The Evolution of Symbolic Thought: At the Intersection of Schizophrenia Psychopathology, Ethnoarchaeology, and Neuroscience.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2024Article
- A tale of two cultures: How L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza bridged the gap between science and the humanities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Genes, culture, and scientific racism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- How cultural innovations trigger the emergence of new pathogens.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
31 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Human cultural traits-behaviors, ideas, and technologies that can be learned from other individuals-can exhibit complex patterns of transmission and evolution, and researchers have developed theoretical models, both verbal and mathematical, to facilitate our understanding of these patterns. Many of the first quantitative models of cultural evolution were modified from existing concepts in theoretical population genetics because cultural evolution has many parallels with, as well as clear differences from, genetic evolution. Furthermore, cultural and genetic evolution can interact with one another and influence both transmission and selection. This interaction requires theoretical treatments of gene-culture coevolution and dual inheritance, in addition to purely cultural evolution. In addition, cultural evolutionary theory is a natural component of studies in demography, human ecology, and many other disciplines. Here, we review the core concepts in cultural evolutionary theory as they pertain to the extension of biology through culture, focusing on cultural evolutionary applications in population genetics, ecology, and demography. For each of these disciplines, we review the theoretical literature and highlight relevant empirical studies. We also discuss the societal implications of the study of cultural evolution and of the interactions of humans with one another and with their environment.
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