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This chapter argues that humans make use of insights and adaptations that humans do not understand. Humans learn very often not by figuring out how things work but by imitating others who have locally useful “know-how.” The chapter then describes the conditions under which selection favors “a psychology that causes most people to adopt beliefs just because others hold those beliefs.” Indeed, it contends that “even the simplest hunter-gatherer societies depend on tools and knowledge far too complex for individuals to acquire on their own.” Ultimately, culture is the storehouse of gradually accumulated, local, and typically tacit knowledge. Thus, “cumulative cultural evolution” is the great and unique advantage of humans.

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 details Robert Boyd's account of social learning and cumulative cultural evolution to illuminate how societies adapt to changing environments and develop ever more sophisticated tools and technology. Humans' ability to learn by imitation and their evolved trusting psychology are used to explain the centrality of social norms, and to explain why and how humans have for so long been “supercooperators.” Even in foraging societies, the extent of human cooperation vastly exceeds that of any other species. Ultimately, millennia of cumulative cultural evolution have helped create a vast “worldwide web of specialization and exchange.” Humans are unique in that “people cooperate in large groups of almost unrelated individuals to provide public goods.” Cooperation in large groups “requires systems of norms enforced by sanctions.” In larger and more complex societies, cooperation and the provision of public goods depend crucially on coercive sanctioning by third parties: institutions such as police and courts.

Originally the concept of culture was proposed only for humans, stressing the importance of social influences on its dynamics and development. Although there is no question that all human groups have different diverse, complex, and rich cultures, a debate begun in the early 1950s raised the issue of animal culture and what it may mean for the uniqueness of human culture. This chapter argues that data from captive studies are difficult to use in this regard owing to the artificiality of the “social dimension” in captive groups and the absence of a species-specific ecological environment-issues that have obscured progress toward a better understanding of human culture. Two major attributes of human culture-cumulative cultural evolution and symbolic culture-arise in adopting an ethnographic approach to the study of differences between wild chimpanzee populations. Culture is observed among both humans and chimpanzees; therefore further work should be aimed at uncovering the specifics of culture in each of these species.