ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
Divide and conquer: intermediate levels of population fragmentation maximize cultural accumulation.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Female friendship and the cultural transmission of low-fertility values: Evidence from rural Poland.PNAS nexus · 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
- Mutual benefits of social learning and algorithmic mediation for cumulative culture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Cultural evolution, social ratcheting and the evolution of human division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Multivariate analyses of Aurignacian and Gravettian personal ornaments support cultural continuity in the Early Upper Palaeolithic.PloS one · 2025Article
- Opening strategies in the game of go from feudalism to superhuman AI.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- 3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Exploring new technologies for the future generation: exploration-exploitation trade-off in an intergenerational framework.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Maintaining Transient Diversity Is a General Principle for Improving Collective Problem Solving.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Network structure shapes the impact of diversity in collective learning.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Minority-group incubators and majority-group reservoirs support the diffusion of climate change adaptations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Mechanisms of collective learning: how can animal groups improve collective performance when repeating a task?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- How subcultures emerge.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- A description and sensitivity analysis of the ArchMatNet agent-based model.PeerJ. Computer science · 2023Article
- Pathways to cultural adaptation: the coevolution of cumulative culture and social networks.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Identifying the determinants of cumulative cultural evolution is a key issue in the interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution. A widely held view is that large and well-connected social networks facilitate cumulative cultural evolution because they promote the spread of useful cultural traits and prevent the loss of cultural knowledge through factors such as drift. This view stems from models that focus on the transmission of cultural information, without considering how new cultural traits actually arise. In this paper, we review the literature from various fields that suggest that, under some circumstances, increased connectedness can decrease cultural diversity and reduce innovation rates. Incorporating this idea into an agent-based model, we explore the effect of population fragmentation on cumulative culture and show that, for a given population size, there exists an intermediate level of population fragmentation that maximizes the rate of cumulative cultural evolution. This result is explained by the fact that fully connected, non-fragmented populations are able to maintain complex cultural traits but produce insufficient variation and so lack the cultural diversity required to produce highly complex cultural traits. Conversely, highly fragmented populations produce a variety of cultural traits but cannot maintain complex ones. In populations with intermediate levels of fragmentation, cultural loss and cultural diversity are balanced in a way that maximizes cultural complexity. Our results suggest that population structure needs to be taken into account when investigating the relationship between demography and cumulative culture.This article is part of the theme issue 'Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution'.
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