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Culture and Evolvability: a Brief Archaeological Perspective

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Abstract

Evolvability refers to the capacity, ability, or potential of an organism to generate heritable variation. Under this view, much extragenetic inheritance is regarded not as noise, fine-tuning, or a luxury add-on to genetic inheritance but as an essential tool for short-term adaptation. With respect to humans, the cultural contribution to evolvability is key to understanding evolution. In many instances, cultural inheritance directs genetic inheritance, not the other way around. Culture, being relatively free from the genetic leash, can produce change that genetic inheritance cannot. Soft inheritance—the view that heredity can be changed by an organism’s experiences—has been disdained for over a century, but in light of the recent outpouring of data demonstrating extragenetic inheritance, defining evolution only in terms of genetic change ignores half the adaptive process, discarding much of what is interesting and relevant. Archaeologists can play a key role in evolvability research, given their contributions to topics such as niche construction, modularity, mosaic evolution, and developmental bias.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Jan-Eric Schlicht and Sasha Diachenko for their kind invitation to participate in this special issue of Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. We also thank two reviewers who made excellent improvements to our discussion.

Note

1. We thank one of our reviewers for the excellent examples in this paragraph.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Geography, and Philosophy and Department of Natural Sciences, Texas A&M University–San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Michael J. O’Brien

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA

    Michael J. O’Brien

  3. School of Biology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife (formerly Laland), UK

    Kevin N. Lala

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  1. Michael J. O’Brien
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MJO and KNL shared equally in formulating the paper’s concept and in writing it.

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Correspondence to Michael J. O’Brien.

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O’Brien, M.J., Lala, K.N. Culture and Evolvability: a Brief Archaeological Perspective. J Archaeol Method Theory 30, 1079–1108 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-023-09624-7

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