ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
The cultural evolution of cultural evolution.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. 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
- One Earth + One Health: An Agile, Evolutionary, System-of-Systems Convergence Paradigm.Environmental science & technology · 2026Review
- Faith, Culture, and Choice: Unraveling the Determinants of Modern Contraceptive Use Among Married Women in Garbatula Sub-County, Kenya.BioMed research international · 2026Article
- Learning to Program "Recycles" Preexisting Frontoparietal Population Codes of Logical Algorithms.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Stone-assisted drumming in Western chimpanzees and its implications for communication and cultural transmission.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Biases, evolutionary mismatch and the comparative analysis of human versus artificial cognition: a comment on Macmillan-Scott and Musolesi (2024).Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Sharing the World-A Social Aspect of Consciousness.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Social tolerance and success-biased social learning underlie the cultural transmission of an induced extractive foraging tradition in a wild tool-using primate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Unpredictable benefits of social information can lead to the evolution of individual differences in social learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Rethinking Norm Psychology.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Affect Is at the Heart of Norm Psychology: Commentary on Heyes, "Rethinking Norm Psychology".Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Adoption, Fostering, and Parental Absence in Vanuatu.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Foundations of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence test the phylogenetic inference of Viking-Age plant use.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The Creative Neurons.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Culture.Current biology : CB · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
What makes fast, cumulative cultural evolution work? Where did it come from? Why is it the sole preserve of humans? We set out a self-assembly hypothesis: cultural evolution evolved culturally. We present an evolutionary account that shows this hypothesis to be coherent, plausible, and worthy of further investigation. It has the following steps: (0) in common with other animals, early hominins had significant capacity for social learning; (1) knowledge and skills learned by offspring from their parents began to spread because bearers had more offspring, a process we call CS1 (or Cultural Selection 1); (2) CS1 shaped attentional learning biases; (3) these attentional biases were augmented by explicit learning biases (judgements about what should be copied from whom). Explicit learning biases enabled (4) the high-fidelity, exclusive copying required for fast cultural accumulation of knowledge and skills by a process we call CS2 (or Cultural Selection 2) and (5) the emergence of cognitive processes such as imitation, mindreading and metacognition-'cognitive gadgets' specialized for cultural learning. This self-assembly hypothesis is consistent with archaeological evidence that the stone tools used by early hominins were not dependent on fast, cumulative cultural evolution, and suggests new priorities for research on 'animal culture'. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.
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