Is the cultural evolution of technology cumulative or combinatorial? [Both, obviously, but...]

A new preprint by yours truly: Is the cultural evolution of technology cumulative or combinatorial? https://t.co/toK5pMXYqc

Comments and feedback would be much appreciated.

— James Winters (@replicatedtypo) September 27, 2020

The rest of the tweet stream:

Now, before I get too much pushback with the title, it's clearly the case that technology is both cumulative and combinatorial. These aren't mutually exclusive perspectives...

But models of cumulative culture often focus on incremental innovation and the stability of cultural transmission. As such, there is a tendency here to black box generative mechanisms in favour of more complex social learning ones.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this claim, and a few papers have focused on both social learning and combination in the evolution of technology (see paper for references). However, even here, I think the role of combination in technological evolution is downplayed...

Especially in the context of purposeful problem-solving where technologies not only solve existing problems, they continually open new problem-solving opportunities for exploration (see Kaufmann's idea of the Adjacent Possible).