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This chapter examines socialization and the process by which social norms become internalized, how this capacity for internalization could have evolved, and why the norms internalized tend to be group-beneficial. It begins with a discussion of cultural transmission and how it overrides fitness by taking account of two facts. First, the phenotypic expression of an individual's genetic inheritance depends on a developmental process that is plastic and open-ended. Second, this developmental process is deliberately structured—by elders, teachers, political leaders, and religious figures—to foster certain kinds of development and to thwart others. The chapter then introduces a purely phenotypic model in which, as a result of the effectiveness of socialization, a fitness-reducing norm may be maintained in a population. It also describes the gene-culture coevolution of a fitness-reducing norm before concluding with an analysis of the link between internalization of norms and altruism.

This chapter describes a variety of approaches to modeling social learning, cultural evolution, and gene-culture coevolution. The model-building exercise typically starts with a set of assumptions about the key processes to be explored, along with the nature of their relations. These assumptions are then translated into the mathematical expressions that constitute the model. The operation of the model is then investigated, normally using a combination of analytical mathematical techniques and simulation, to determine relevant outcomes, such as the equilibrium states or patterns of change over time. The chapter presents examples of the modeling of cultural transmission and considers parallels between cultural and biological evolution. It then discusses theoretical approaches to social learning and cultural evolution, including population-genetic style models of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution, neutral models and random copying, social foraging theory, spatially explicit models, reaction-diffusion models, agent-based models, and phylogenetic models.

This chapter proposes some distinct patterns of transmission that are attested across multiple chronological periods and regional settings, shedding further light on the institutional contexts of image transfer in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The distribution of composite figures in the visual record raises a number of intriguing problems for the study of cultural transmission. Their impressive transmission across cultural boundaries is consistent with the expectations of an “epidemiological” approach to the spread of culture, which would accord them a special kind of cognitive catchiness. This chapter considers the institutional role of externally derived images within centralized (or centralizing) societies and suggests that the macro-distribution of composites follows two distinct but regular modes of transmission and reception: the “transformative” mode and the “integrative” mode. It also introduces a third mode of transmission, termed “protective” mode.

The Introduction pursues the theme of identity by considering the varieties of ‘family’ in the plays. The grounding of civilization is investigated by means of the dichotomy of orality and literature, as well as the polarity between Thebes and Athens. To develop this analysis, the profile and potential of Oedipus and Antigone in Western and African philosophical traditions is examined. The book's argument about cultural transmission contends that the African-descended adaptations of Oedipus and Antigone indict colonial culture for the infliction of oedipal violence, while themselves enacting an oedipal bind as they simultaneously embrace and resist those cultures. Above and beyond this bind, the plays offer more benign models of transmission constituted within the African continent and diaspora. The Introduction recasts the arguments of Freud and Bloom by a focus on Fanon, and advocates a specific theoretical re-orientation of reception studies to equip it to do postcolonial analysis.

Chapter 6 considers the form and spread of spirit concepts, drawing heavily on ethnographic data and emerging theories within epidemiological studies of culture. This chapter suggests why spirit concepts are an ubiquitous feature of human culture, arguing (on the basis of cutting‐edge research in the cognitive sciences) that such concepts have a distinct cognitive advantage in cultural transmission.

This chapter examines composite animals as counterfactual images by focusing on a school of evolutionary psychology called the “epidemiology of culture.” Experimental studies show that the cognitive processing of animal forms is highly sensitized to part-whole relations, such that a total presence may be inferred from quite limited visual cues. Pictures of animals—even when jumbled, distorted, or incomplete—may therefore activate neural pathways attuned to the recognition and differentiation of living kinds. Such observations make it possible to build bridges between the cognition of images and theories of cultural transmission. The chapter introduces a number of comparative observations on the status of composites in the visual arts of hunter-gatherers.

This chapter considers the cultural ecology of composite animals. Paleolithic and Neolithic societies sometimes created durable images of composite beings, and the few surviving candidates have often been accorded great prominence in modern interpretations. Yet they remain strikingly isolated. If the popularity of minimally counterintuitive images is to be explained by their core cultural content and its appeal to universal cognitive biases, the question that arises is: Why did composite figures fail so spectacularly to “catch on” across the many millennia of innovation in visual culture that precede the onset of urban life? Much hinges here upon our conceptualization of the “counterintuitive” and its role in cultural transmission. To determine what kind of “cultural ecology” the composite animal belongs to, the chapter examines composites in early dynastic Egypt before discussing the relationship between the spread of urban civilization and the widespread transmission of images depicting composite beings.

This chapter describes how mental representations of gods are transmitted through a population as public representations, and ultimately serve as the basis of the cultural systems called “religion.” Drawing on an “epidemiological” model of culture, the chapter shows how religious ideas, like other kinds of ideas, depend on shared mental mechanisms in the process of acquisition, storage, and transmission. These shared mechanisms in turn explain the underlying similarity of god concepts in diverse cultures. The chapter also defines and defends religion as belief in supernatural beings and the public ideas (doctrines), behaviors (rituals), and social structure (community) that coalesce around them, arguing that contrary to past perspectives on what constitutes religion, the presence of god concepts are necessary for fostering the commitment, motivation, and transmission potential that such systems require.

Naturalistic approaches to culture face an adjustment problem: many entities commonly found in the social sciences (traditions, institutions, social norms, etc.) do not seem to have any plausible counterpart in the natural sciences that are closest to humans (biology and psychology). The natural world seems too tiny to accommodate the furniture of the social world. There are two ways around this problem. The first consists in trying to add new elements to our biological and psychological toolkit that may explain cultures, institutions, and norms. For example, one might hypothesize that special faculties of imitation and processes of group-selection allowed cultural norms to emerge and constrain individuals, or that humans have a special capacity to create institutions by means of collective intentionality. Cultural epidemiologists, in contrast, try to give descriptions of cultural phenomena that do not include such unwieldy objects as cultural forces, collective intentions, mind-coercive norms, and such. A culture, in the epidemiological view, is a distribution of representations within a population. Being a statistical abstraction, this distribution lacks an essence and causal powers. Cultural representations are transmitted in the same way as representations that never become cultural; they just spread further and survive longer. They do so, not because they travel the superhighway of imitation—there need not be such a highway—but because their content makes them more attractive to individual human minds. People from different cultures may view the world differently in many cases, but that is not because their culture puts some sort of constraint on their ideas; in these cases, their ideas and their culture are the very same thing. The epidemiological approach is a way to deflate our common views about culture, so that it no longer seems to outstretch the natural world. The two strategies are not incompatible. When trying to fit two pieces together, it makes sense to shrink one of the pieces while enlarging the other.

Philosophers are more interested in normative questions rather than descriptive questions such as the origins of moral values. Questioning where our values come from is seen as irrelevant and those making the inquiry are accused of committing genetic fallacy. This chapter reconsiders the assumptions centering on the argument that normative theories are designed to encompass present-day intuitions. Investigating the origin of values can be done through the genealogical method, as shown in this chapter, that supports the idea of moral convictions being the product of social history through justifying examples of Friedrich Nietzsche's historical analyses. The chapter also examines whether it can be used to support skepticism on current moral values and compares it to Nietzsche's overstated usage of genealogy.

Culture works at many levels of aggregation. The culture of a group, firm, industry or profession; of a region; and of a country, can be discussed. Yet at whatever level is chosen to define it – national, regional, industrial, or corporate – culture remains the means by which non-genetic information is communicated, either within a given generation of agents or from one generation to the next. Technological practice forms an essential part of such cultural transmission. But technological practice frequently combines theoretical knowledge that may itself be pretty well universal in scope with more practical knowledge that is often much more local and culture specific in its application. Knowledge assets not only differ in the discretion they allow when applied, but also in how that discretion is interpreted. The discretion available is a function of the degrees of freedom that characterize a knowledge asset.

This chapter talks about three major intertwined themes that emerge in the new cultural economics: causal effects of culture on economic outcomes and institutions, the origins of culture, and the issues of cultural transmission, persistence, and change. It emphasizes the studies related to the field of long-run economic growth and development which explores culture as one of the key “deep determinants” of economic performance. The chapter reviews some of the recent empirical studies attempting to identify the causal effects of culture, and examines the research on the origins of culture, its social benefits, and costs. It also considers the evidence on cultural persistence and discusses the mechanisms of cultural transmission and change.

Human languages are far more complex than any animal communication system. Furthermore, they are learned, rather than innate, a fact which partially accounts for their great diversity. Human languages are semantically compositional, generating new meaningful combinations as functions of the meanings of their elementary parts (words). This is unlike any known animal communication system (except the limited waggle dance of honeybees). Humans can use language to describe and refer to objects and events in the far distant past and the far distant future, another feature which distinguishes language from animal communication systems. The complexity of languages arises partly from self-organization through cultural transmission over many generations of users. The human willingness altruistically to impart information is also unique.

This chapter reports two case studies in which experimental simulations of cultural transmission have provided insights into the processes of cultural innovation. The first case study shows how experimental laboratory simulations can provide valuable insights into the processes that govern cultural invention and innovation. The second reveals that when the fitness of an artifact is identified by a multimodal adaptive landscape, then individual learning can cause artifacts to diverge to different locally adaptive states, that is, generate multiple stable inventions, whereas biased cultural transmission can cause artifacts to converge on a single globally adaptive form, that is, produce an innovation.

This chapter explores how the principles and methods of cultural evolution can inform our understanding of technology and science. Both technology and science are prime examples of cumulative cultural evolution, with each generation preserving and building upon the achievements of prior generations. A key benefit of an evolutionary approach to technological or scientific change is “population thinking,” where broad trends and patterns are explained in terms of individual-level mechanisms of variation, selection, and transmission. This chapter outlines some of these mechanisms and their implications for technological change, including sources of innovation, types of social learning, facilitatory developmental factors, and cultural transmission mechanisms. The role of external representations and human-constructed environments in technological evolution are explored, and factors are examined which determine the varying rates of technological change over time: from intrinsic characteristics of single technological traits, such as efficacy or manufacturing cost, to larger social and population-level factors, such as population size or social institutions. Science can be viewed as both a product of cultural evolution as well as a form of cultural evolution in its own right. Science and technology constitute separate yet interacting evolutionary processes. Outstanding issues and promising avenues for future investigation are highlighted and potential applications of this work are noted. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

This chapter presents a socialized attention hypothesis and argues that people in different cultures are bound to acquire attention strategies that vary in attentional breadth. Evidence consistently shows that Asians tend to be more holistic in attention, dispersing it more broadly and simultaneously to multiple stimuli, whereas Caucasian Americans tend to be more focused on a single object. Evidence is particularly strong in respect to visual attention. However, evidence has also been found in respect to auditory attention, multitasking, perceptual inference, and attention to mnemonic context.