ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Cultural macroevolution 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 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Carneiro's global dataset of cultural traits in ethnographic and historical societies: a digital edition.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact.Science advances · 2025Article
- Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Exosomal miR-181d-5p Derived from Rapamycin-Conditioned MDSC Alleviated Allograft Rejection by Targeting KLF6.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2023Article
- From Text to Thought: How Analyzing Language Can Advance Psychological Science.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2022Article
- Article
- Claude Lévi-Strauss as a humanist forerunner of cultural macroevolution studies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Culture? There is a Missing Link Between the Natural and the Social Sciences.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2021Article
- Cultural similarity among coreligionists within and between countries.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- 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 selection and biased transformation: two dynamics of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Toward a Cultural Evolutionary Psychology: Why the Evolutionary Approach does not Imply Reductionism or Determinism.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2021Article
- A phylogenetic analysis of revolution and afterlife beliefs.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Is Wilson's religion Durkheim's, or Hobbes's Leviathan?History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2021Article
- The evolution of productive organizations.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Article
- Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- The extension of biology through culture.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Pursuing Darwin's curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Evolutionary thinking can be applied to both cultural microevolution and macroevolution. However, much of the current literature focuses on cultural microevolution. In this article, we argue that the growing availability of large cross-cultural datasets facilitates the use of computational methods derived from evolutionary biology to answer broad-scale questions about the major transitions in human social organization. Biological methods can be extended to human cultural evolution. We illustrate this argument with examples drawn from our recent work on the roles of Big Gods and ritual human sacrifice in the evolution of large, stratified societies. These analyses show that, although the presence of Big Gods is correlated with the evolution of political complexity, in Austronesian cultures at least, they do not play a causal role in ratcheting up political complexity. In contrast, ritual human sacrifice does play a causal role in promoting and sustaining the evolution of stratified societies by maintaining and legitimizing the power of elites. We briefly discuss some common objections to the application of phylogenetic modeling to cultural evolution and argue that the use of these methods does not require a commitment to either gene-like cultural inheritance or to the view that cultures are like vertebrate species. We conclude that the careful application of these methods can substantially enhance the prospects of an evolutionary science of human history.
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