ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cognitive appeal promotes the persistence of inefficient solutions and hinders cumulative cultural evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- The technical-reasoning network is recruited when people observe others make or teach how to make tools: An fMRI study.iScience · 2025Article
- When to stop social learning from a predecessor in an information-foraging task.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years.PloS one · 2025Article
- Trade-offs, control conditions, and alternative designs in the experimental study of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Review
- Transmission Versus Truth, Imitation Versus Innovation: What Children Can Do That Large Language and Language-and-Vision Models Cannot (Yet).Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Cumulative route improvements spontaneously emerge in artificial navigators even in the absence of sophisticated communication or thought.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Cognitive flexibility supports the development of cumulative cultural learning in children.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Social learning in swarm robotics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Experiments in artificial culture: from noisy imitation to storytelling robots.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Abstract
Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE)-defined as the process by which beneficial modifications are culturally transmitted and progressively accumulated over time-has long been argued to underlie the unparalleled diversity and complexity of human culture. In this paper, I argue that not just any kind of cultural accumulation will give rise to human-like culture. Rather, I suggest that human CCE depends on the gradual exploitation of natural phenomena, which are features of our environment that, through the laws of physics, chemistry or biology, generate reliable effects which can be exploited for a purpose. I argue that CCE comprises two distinct processes: optimizing cultural traits that exploit a given set of natural phenomena (Type I CCE) and expanding the set of natural phenomena we exploit (Type II CCE). I argue that the most critical features of human CCE, including its open-ended dynamic, stems from Type II CCE. Throughout the paper, I contrast the two processes and discuss their respective socio-cognitive requirements. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.
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