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All Innovations are Equal, but Some More than Others: (Re)integrating Modification Processes to the Origins of Cumulative Culture

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Abstract

The cumulative open-endedness of human cultures represents a major break with the social traditions of nonhuman species. As traditions are altered and the modifications retained along the cultural lineage, human populations are capable of producing complex traits that no individual could have figured out on its own. For cultures to produce increasingly complex traditions, improvements and modifications must be kept for the next generations to build upon. High-fidelity transmission would thus act as a ratchet, retaining modifications and allowing the historical buildup of complex traditions. Mechanisms acting against slippage are important, of course, but cultures also need to move forward for the ratchet to retain anything important. In this article, I argue that studies of modification-generating processes and the many ways they shape cumulative culture have been overlooked. Key to a better understanding of cultural modification processes is taking seriously that cultural traditions consist of complex, hierarchically structured recipes. Taking such structures seriously and assessing the different ways they can vary in cultural design space, a novel picture for the onset of cumulative cultural evolution emerges. I argue that a possible impediment for cumulative culture in nonhuman animals may in fact reside not so much in the fidelity of their social transmission but rather in the constraints, internal and external, on their capacity to modify complex, hierarchically structured cultural recipes.

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Notes

  1. As with most of the literature concerned with the evolution of cultural recipes, I will remain agnostic as to the precise way these recipes are mentally represented by the individuals, and will thus discuss cultural variation and modifications in terms of changes in the recipes themselves.

  2. I choose to characterize design spaces in terms of differences in actions only, putting aside differences in the cognitive structure of complex recipes. Doing so gives us a commensurable characterization of cultural variation for species capable of hierarchical modifications and for those that are only capable of action-level modifications. Adding the cognitive/functional structures of recipes in such space will complicate the whole matter beyond the needs of the argument made here. Nevertheless, future work will have to deal with such complexity (e.g., see Lombard & Haidle 2012).

  3. Tennie et al. (2009) refer to the set of functional recipes that are accessible through learning from the environment as that species’ “zone of latent solutions.”

  4. There are no reasons to assume that the cognitive capacity to produce modifications has in fact evolved as adaptions to serve such function. The underlying cognitive mechanisms may have evolved for other reasons, about which I will not speculate further here. Moreover, as a reviewer noticed, I have implicitly assumed that hierarchy-level modifications can only happen in one’s mind, i.e., through some sort of cognitive process of mentally manipulating hierarchical structures. Indeed, there is always the possibility that a hierarchy-level modification happens by accident (as I have suggested for action-level modifications), either by discovering one “serendipitously” in one’s own behavior or by observing another individual’s accidental behavioral change. Intuitively, such form of accidental hierarchy-level change, although not impossible, strikes me as a relatively rare phenomenon as it likely requires a “large mistake” (but this is, ultimately, an empirical question, albeit a very interesting one). Nevertheless, I don’t see this possibility as antagonistic to the way hierarchy-level modifications are defined, i.e., as a type of change in a complex recipe. Such accidental hierarchy-level modifications might allow a species with only action-level modification mechanisms to produce, once in a while, a hierarchy-level change and move forward in a rugged landscape. However, if early functional landscapes are highly rugged, creative cognitive processes capable of producing hierarchy-level modifications are likely to produce more systematically the cumulation of hierarchy-level changes, a cumulative process that is in turn more likely to be detected in the archaeological record than rarer, accidental hierarchy-level changes. I thank the anonymous reviewer for asking me to elaborate on this point.

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Acknowledgments

I dedicate this paper to the memory of Werner Callebaut, whose friendship and mentorship have been and remain invaluable to me. I am grateful to Alberto Acerbi, Andrew Buskell, Richard Byrne, and Olivier Morin for useful comments on a previous draft. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and the fellows at the KLI for useful discussions. This paper was written with the financial support of the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture while I was being hosted by the KLI Institute.

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  1. Science Studies Program, Departments of Cognitive Science and Philosophy, Social Mind Center, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Mathieu Charbonneau

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Charbonneau, M. All Innovations are Equal, but Some More than Others: (Re)integrating Modification Processes to the Origins of Cumulative Culture. Biol Theory 10, 322–335 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-015-0227-x

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