ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2023
Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 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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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Foraging history of individual elephants using DNA metabarcoding.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Modelling effects of inter-group contact on links between population size and cultural complexity.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Human major transitions from the perspective of distributed adaptations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions: introduction to the theme issue.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The transition to specialization of knowledge within populations could have facilitated the accumulation of cultural complexity in humans. Specialization allows populations to increase their cultural repertoire without requiring that members of that population increase their individual capacity to accumulate knowledge. However, specialization also means that domain-specific knowledge can be concentrated in small subsets of the population, making it more susceptible to loss. Here, we use a model of cultural evolution to demonstrate that specialized populations can be more sensitive to stochastic loss of knowledge than populations without subdivision of knowledge, and that demographic and environmental changes have an amplified effect on populations with knowledge specialization. Finally, we suggest that specialization can be a double-edged sword; specialized populations may have an advantage in accumulating cultural traits but may also be less likely to expand and establish themselves successfully in new demes owing to the increased cultural loss that they experience during the population bottlenecks that often characterize such expansions. This article is part of the theme issue 'Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions'.
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