ArticleNature communications2018
Innovation and cumulative culture through tweaks and leaps in online programming contests.
Article in Nature communications, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Payoff selectivity drives collective intelligence during dynamic resource tracking in humans.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Propagation and preservation of AI-discovered problem-solving strategies in human culture.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Cultural evolution in the laboratory: evolution of cooperative altruistic punishing.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- The refinement paradox and cumulative cultural evolution: Complex products of collective improvement favor conformist outcomes, blind copying, and hyper-credulity.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- 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
- Agentic processes in cultural evolution: relevance to Anthropocene sustainability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Cultural transmission of move choice in chess.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- A cultural evolutionary theory that explains both gradual and punctuated change.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Short-term temporal analysis and children's knowledge of the composition of important medicinal plants: the structural core hypothesis.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2022Review
- Insights about the common generative rule underlying an information foraging task can be facilitated via collective search.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Modeling Discontinuous Cultural Evolution: The Impact of Cross-Domain Transfer.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Dynamic Expectation Maximization Algorithm for Estimation of Linear Systems with Colored Noise.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Chimpanzees' behavioral flexibility, social tolerance, and use of tool-composites in a progressively challenging foraging problem.iScience · 2021Article
- Prestige and content biases together shape the cultural transmission of narratives.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Experimental evolutionary simulations of learning, memory and life history.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Flexible learning, rather than inveterate innovation or copying, drives cumulative knowledge gain.Science advances · 2020Article
- Comparing Groups of Independent Solvers and Transmission Chains as Methods for Collective Problem-Solving.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to build progressively on the achievements of earlier generations is central to human uniqueness, but experimental investigations of this cumulative cultural evolution lack real-world complexity. Here, we studied the dynamics of cumulative culture using a large-scale data set from online collaborative programming competitions run over 14 years. We show that, within each contest population, performance increases over time through frequent 'tweaks' of the current best entry and rare innovative 'leaps' (successful tweak:leap ratio = 16:1), the latter associated with substantially greater variance in performance. Cumulative cultural evolution reduces technological diversity over time, as populations focus on refining high-performance solutions. While individual entries borrow from few sources, iterative copying allows populations to integrate ideas from many sources, demonstrating a new form of collective intelligence. Our results imply that maximising technological progress requires accepting high levels of failure.
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