ReviewProceedings. Biological sciences2018
What is cumulative cultural evolution?
Review in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 98 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
98 citing papers in PubMed.
- Limited evidence for executive function load impairing selective copying in a win-stay lose-shift task.PloS one · 2021Trial
- Propagation and preservation of AI-discovered problem-solving strategies in human culture.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Valuing Behavioral By-Products: Evolutionary Significance of Neutrally Drifting and Exaptive Cultures in Primates.American journal of primatology · 2026Review
- Article
- The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Context, Consequence, Coincidence, and Cumulative Cultural Evolution: Linking Creativity and Culturo-Behavioral Phenomena Together Using Systems Principles and Processes of Selection by Consequences.Perspectives on behavior science · 2026Review
- The evolution of the concepts of 'primate culture' in Western science.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Review
- Identifying the necessary conditions for large populations to enhance cumulative culture.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Did Down-Regulated Instincts Enable Human Gene-Culture Coevolution?Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- 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
- The effect of habitat health and environmental change on cultural diversity and richness in animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The growing methodological toolkit for identifying and studying social learning and culture in non-human animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- A neural network model for the evolution of reconstructive social learning.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The cultural evolution of distortion in music (and other norms of mixed appeal).Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Mutual benefits of social learning and algorithmic mediation for cumulative culture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Two-by-two ordinal patterns in art paintings.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- When to stop social learning from a predecessor in an information-foraging task.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years.PloS one · 2025Article
38 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In recent years, the phenomenon of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has become the focus of major research interest in biology, psychology and anthropology. Some researchers argue that CCE is unique to humans and underlies our extraordinary evolutionary success as a species. Others claim to have found CCE in non-human species. Yet others remain sceptical that CCE is even important for explaining human behavioural diversity and complexity. These debates are hampered by multiple and often ambiguous definitions of CCE. Here, we review how researchers define, use and test CCE. We identify a core set of criteria for CCE which are both necessary and sufficient, and may be found in non-human species. We also identify a set of extended criteria that are observed in human CCE but not, to date, in other species. Different socio-cognitive mechanisms may underlie these different criteria. We reinterpret previous theoretical models and observational and experimental studies of both human and non-human species in light of these more fine-grained criteria. Finally, we discuss key issues surrounding information, fitness and cognition. We recommend that researchers are more explicit about what components of CCE they are testing and claiming to demonstrate.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.