ArticleRoyal Society open science2017
Inferring individual-level processes from population-level patterns in cultural evolution.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The interplay between age structure and cultural transmission.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Respiratory Movements at Different Ages.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2023Article
- Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history.PloS one · 2022Article
- Foraging zebra finches (Biology letters · 2021Article
- Processing of novel food reveals payoff and rank-biased social learning in a wild primate.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Pathways to social inequality.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- Classifying evolutionary forces in language change using neural networks.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Cultural linkage: the influence of package transmission on cultural dynamics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Sigmoidal Acquisition Curves Are Good Indicators of Conformist Transmission.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Reply to 'Sigmoidal Acquisition Curves are Good Indicators of Conformist Transmission'.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Cumulative culture in the laboratory: methodological and theoretical challenges.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Generative inference for cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Article
- Inferring individual-level processes from population-level patterns in cultural evolution.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- A generative inference framework for analysing patterns of cultural change in sparse population data with evidence for fashion trends in LBK culture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2015Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Our species is characterized by a great degree of cultural variation, both within and between populations. Understanding how group-level patterns of culture emerge from individual-level behaviour is a long-standing question in the biological and social sciences. We develop a simulation model capturing demographic and cultural dynamics relevant to human cultural evolution, focusing on the interface between population-level patterns and individual-level processes. The model tracks the distribution of variants of cultural traits across individuals in a population over time, conditioned on different pathways for the transmission of information between individuals. From these data, we obtain theoretical expectations for a range of statistics commonly used to capture population-level characteristics (e.g. the degree of cultural diversity). Consistent with previous theoretical work, our results show that the patterns observed at the level of groups are rooted in the interplay between the transmission pathways and the age structure of the population. We also explore whether, and under what conditions, the different pathways can be distinguished based on their group-level signatures, in an effort to establish theoretical limits to inference. Our results show that the temporal dynamic of cultural change over time retains a stronger signature than the cultural composition of the population at a specific point in time. Overall, the results suggest a shift in focus from identifying the one individual-level process that likely produced the observed data to excluding those that likely did not. We conclude by discussing the implications for empirical studies of human cultural evolution.
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