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Modularity and Recombination in Technological Evolution

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Abstract

Cultural evolutionists typically emphasize the informational aspect of social transmission, that of the learning, stabilizing, and transformation of mental representations along cultural lineages. Social transmission also depends on the production of public displays such as utterances, behaviors, and artifacts, as these displays are what social learners learn from. However, the generative processes involved in the production of public displays are usually abstracted away in both theoretical assessments and formal models. The aim of this paper is to complement the informational view with a generative dimension, emphasizing how the production of public displays both enable and constrain the production of modular cultural recipes through the process of innovation by recombination. In order to avoid a circular understanding of cultural recombination and cultural modularity, we need to take seriously the nature and structure of the generative processes involved in the maintenance of cultural traditions. A preliminary analysis of what recombination and modularity consist of is offered. It is shown how the study of recombination and modularity depends on a finer understanding of the generative processes involved in the production phase of social transmission. Finally, it is argued that the recombination process depends on the inventive production of an interface between modules and the complex recipes in which they figure, and that such interfaces are the direct result of the generative processes involved in the production of these recipes. The analysis is supported by the case study of the transition from the Oldowan to the Early Acheulean flake detachment techniques.

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Notes

  1. Mechanisms other than social transmission participate in maintaining traditions, such as a rich shared learning environment (Sterelny 2012), common cognitive biases (Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004), and motivational factors (Morin 2016), to name a few.

  2. There is a vast scientific literature concerned with the structure of behaviors. One general point of consensus among cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, paleoarcheologists, anthropologists, primatologists, and artificial intelligence researchers is that behaviors are hierarchically organized (Botvinick 2008; Byrne 2003; Byrne and Russon 1998; Chomsky 1957; Greenfield 1991; Guerra-Filho and Aloimonos 2012; Lashley 1951; Mesoudi and Whiten 2004; Miller et al. 1960; Pastra and Aloimonos 2012; Schank and Abelson 1977; Simon 1962; Stout 2011; Whiten 2002). Cultural evolutionists have also noted that complex cultural recipes are hierarchically organized and have studied some of the evolutionary implications of these structures (Enquist et al. 2011; Mesoudi and O’Brien 2008; Mesoudi and Whiten 2004).

  3. Just how we decide what constitutes a basic action unit will not be addressed here in any detail. There has been debates on just what the appropriate level of description is and whether there exists such thing as an atomic action (e.g., Lombard and Haidle 2012; Perreault et al. 2013). For the remainder, we can assume that all agree on the right granularity of description, as what is of interest here is not the proper grain of description for complex behaviors but the implications of their hierarchical structures having different degrees of integration.

  4. The expression is mine, but it is adapted from Moore (2007, 2010) who also develops a hierarchical description of the recipe’s functional structure. However, Moore writes about a “basic flake unit,” which suggests a static view, an object. The active form “flaking” is preferred here as it makes it clearer that the unit is a behavioral/cognitive process and not a material end-result.

  5. Although technically the Early Acheulean technique examined here is not a part of the Acheulean industry, it is nevertheless generally considered part of the transition leading to the Acheulean. See Stout (2011) for discussion.

  6. Some argue that the ability to manipulate the complex hierarchical structure of structured behaviors is based on the same neurological substrates used to manipulate linguistic structures (e.g., Greenfield 1991; Stout and Chaminade 2009; Stout et al. 2008).

  7. Following most paleoarcheologists, it is assumed here that the transition from the Oldowan to the Early Acheulean techniques is a cultural (technological) one, made possible (at least in part) by the cultural transmission of the flaking techniques. Some doubts have been raised about this possibility (see Richerson and Boyd 2005; Corbey et al. 2016). Even if it was shown that the Oldowan-Early Acheulean transition was not cultural, the general conceptual analysis developed her would still stand on its own. Moreover, the basic flaking unit is known to be transmissible through social learning as even more sophisticated, clearly cultural techniques employ it (Whittaker 1994).

  8. The case of learning the basic flaking unit might not be generalizable to all modular cultural traditions as we might not expect all cultural recipes to depend on practice and trial-and-error learning. However, the case study shows that the material nature of the generative processes can have an important role in such forms of social learning and will thus be relevant when perpetuating a cultural tradition requires each individual in the chain to practice actions and learn about materials.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Christophe Heintz, Olivier Morin, Mike O’Brien, and Dan Sperber for useful discussions and comments on the ideas presented here. The research reported in this manuscript was supported by the postdoctoral scholarship in technology studies of the Science Studies program at the Central European University and by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° [609819], SOMICS.

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  1. Science Studies Program, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Oktober 6 street 7, First floor, Room 133, Budapest, 1051, Hungary

    Mathieu Charbonneau

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Charbonneau, M. Modularity and Recombination in Technological Evolution. Philos. Technol. 29, 373–392 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0228-0

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