ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution.
Review 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 16 papers.
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16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The evolutionary dynamics of how languages signal who does what to whom.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Geography is not destiny: A quantitative test of Diamond's axis of orientation hypothesis.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Phylogenetic insight into the origin of tones.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Function predicts how people treat their dogs in a global sample.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neighbours and relatives: accounting for spatial distribution when testing causal hypotheses in cultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Food storage facilitates professional religious specialization in hunter-gatherer societies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Claude Lévi-Strauss as a humanist forerunner of cultural macroevolution studies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Foundations of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.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
- Games and enculturation: A cross-cultural analysis of cooperative goal structures in Austronesian games.PloS one · 2021Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Modern phylogenetic methods are increasingly being used to address questions about macro-level patterns in cultural evolution. These methods can illuminate the unobservable histories of cultural traits and identify the evolutionary drivers of trait change over time, but their application is not without pitfalls. Here, we outline the current scope of research in cultural tree thinking, highlighting a toolkit of best practices to navigate and avoid the pitfalls and 'abuses' associated with their application. We emphasize two principles that support the appropriate application of phylogenetic methodologies in cross-cultural research: researchers should (1) draw on multiple lines of evidence when deciding if and which types of phylogenetic methods and models are suitable for their cross-cultural data, and (2) carefully consider how different cultural traits might have different evolutionary histories across space and time. When used appropriately phylogenetic methods can provide powerful insights into the processes of evolutionary change that have shaped the broad patterns of human history. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.
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