Nichols R, Charbonneau M, Chellappoo A, et al. Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges. Evolutionary Human Sciences. 2024;6:e12. doi:10.1017/ehs.2024.2
Abstract: The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘social learning’, ‘cumulative culture’) in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize its empirical findings, the field's theoretical challenges receive less critical attention even though challenges of a theoretical or conceptual nature underlie most of the problems identified by Cultural Evolution Society members. Guided by the heterogeneous ‘grand challenges’ emergent in this survey, this paper restates those challenges and adopts an organizational style requisite to discussion of them. The paper's goal is to contribute to increasing conceptual clarity and theoretical discernment around the most pressing challenges facing the field of cultural evolutionary science. It will be of most interest to cultural evolutionary scientists, theoreticians, philosophers of science and interdisciplinary researchers.
From the introduction:
An efficient means for researchers concerned with CET [cultural evolutionary theory] to contribute to improvements in the field is to take account of and respond to the most pressing stated challenges facing the field. As a result, the present critical review of theoretical needs takes its cue from results of a recent survey of the membership of the Cultural Evolution Society about the field's ‘grand challenges’ (Brewer et al., Reference Brewer, Gelfand, Jackson, MacDonald, Peregrine and Richerson2017). Published results of this survey detail two varied sets of challenges. The first set was drawn from semantic analysis of topics directly from survey results. (Subsequent references to ‘survey results’ are to this paper.) Its most pressing challenge, revealed to be about twice as important as the next topic, was with ‘knowledge synthesis’. The authors state that this topic relates ‘primarily to issues of theoretical integration and speaks to the idea that while many behavioural scientists and humanities scholars see culture as a defining feature of humankind, different subfields rarely read each other's work or build interdisciplinary research programmes to explore how human cultures differ from those of other animals’ (Brewer et al., Reference Brewer, Gelfand, Jackson, MacDonald, Peregrine and Richerson2017: 1). Additional topics of appreciable concern in the first set of results were topics labelled ‘culture definition’, ‘theory’, ‘shared language’ across the disciplines, ‘pro-sociality’ and ‘cultural transmission’.
Language as an evolutionary phenomenon
Until not long ago, discussion of language ‘evolution’ was somewhat taboo. As recent as 1994, textbooks observed that ‘Evolution … has become a “dirty word” in modern linguistic theory’ (McMahon, Reference McMahon1994: 314). This is because through the twentieth century the nomenclature of evolution risked some allusion to outdated, often racist, views about how some languages – and by extension some social groups – might be ‘more evolved’ than others. It is now uncontroversial within linguistics that no language is inherently ‘better’ or ‘more useful’ than others. So, while vigilance must be maintained, the socio-political risks associated with evolutionary talk have begun to fade, and in the past 30 or so years evolutionary approaches to languages have grown dramatically in prominence (Tallerman & Gibson, Reference Tallerman and Gibson2011; Dediu & de Boer, Reference Dediu and de Boer2016).
Today, the expression ‘language evolution’ is widely used to describe at least two distinct phenom- ena and one methodological advance. The two phenomena are: the biological process by which humans, and apparently only humans, became a ’language-ready’ species; and the set of cultural – or ‘cultural evolutionary’ – processes by which relatively simple and unstructured systems become highly structured, and hence acquire some of the common, characteristic properties of languages, such as symbolism, compositionality and duality of patterning. The methodological advance is the application of phylogenetic tools, derived from population genetics, to study language history and lan- guage change. All three of these literatures are now very large, comprising thousands of papers each. Multiple past papers review, summarize and synthesize them (e.g. Mace & Holden, 2005; Tomasello & Call, 2019; Greenhill et al., 2020; Haspelmath, 2020; Roberts & Sneller, 2020; Scott-Phillips & Heintz, 2023; Scott-Phillips & Kirby, 2010). Here we focus on a philosophical issue arising from this growing influence of evolutionary thinking.
The challenge, put simply, is: what exactly does the evolutionary perspective bring that other approaches do not? The biology of language, language emergence and language change have all been important topics for language science for a long time, and a great deal of what has been uncovered by evolutionary approaches has previously been investigated and described in other terms. Research adopting an evolutionary perspective has enriched our understanding, provided new methods and added many new findings, but does it fundamentally alter our understanding of what the empirical phenomenon is and how it works?
One answer might be that a relatively faithful transposition of the Darwinian model – where vari- ation, selection and inheritance combine to generate natural selection and hence the appearance of design in nature – is possible, and brings with it new insights, explanations and tools. With languages, there is something like variation (linguistic items vary enormously), there is something like selection (some items become more common than others) and there is something like inheritance (we learn from the previous generation). Some linguists indeed propose that linguistic items, of some sort or another, could be identified as units of selection closely analogous to genes (e.g. Croft, 2008; Ritt, 2004; Tamariz, 2019). However, deeper analysis raises difficult questions, and the issue is contentious: a decade ago, a group paper on language as a culturally evolving system observed that, ‘Various scho- lars have proposed that concepts, cultural behaviors, or artifacts may function as replicators. It remains to be seen whether any, all, or some combination of these entities are reasonable candidates for cultural replicators’ (Dediu et al., 2013: 314). The situation has not changed substantially since.
Another response to this question would be to adopt only specific parts of the Darwinian toolkit. That is, one could reduce the role of an analogy between variation in language and variation in genes while retaining other parts of Darwinism (Claidière et al., 2014). For instance, there might be scope for perspectives that adopt population thinking and some commitment to selectionism, but without the stronger commitment to replicators.
I have some remarks on the cultural evolution of language in:
Culture as an Evolutionary Arena, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 19(4): 321-362, 1996, https://www.academia.edu/235113/Culture_as_an_Evolutionary_Arena
The Evolution of Human Culture: Some Notes Prepared for the National Humanities Center (Version 2), Working Paper, 2014, 65 pp.
I have proposed the idea of a coordinator as the cultural analog to the biological gene:
“Rhythm Changes” Notes on Some Genetic Elements in Musical Culture, Signata 6, Annales des Sémiotiques /Annals of Semiotics: Sémiotique de la musique / Music and Meaning. Per Aage Brandt and José Roberto do Carmo Jr., eds. Presses Universitaires Liège, 2015, pp. 271-285, https://www.academia.edu/23287434/_Rhythm_Changes_Notes_on_Some_Genetic_Elements_in_Musical_Culture
No comments:
Post a Comment