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Perspectives on Culture and Agent-based Simulations pp 169–187Cite as

The Role of Stability in Cultural Evolution: Innovation and Conformity in Implicit Knowledge Discovery

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Part of the book series: Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality ((SIPS,volume 3))

Abstract

One of the defining traits of humanity is our capacity for accumulating innovations. While many authors focus on the innovation process itself, Evolutionary Anthropology has become more interested in the accumulation part of this uniqueness, and in particularly whether something like an evolutionary account of cultural acquisition can explain it. In this chapter I discuss the role and sources of innovation in generating culture, and also the role of norms in preserving it. I demonstrate through two sets of simulation experiments a model of cultural evolution exploring the problem of cultural stability and change. The first models the impact of noisy transmission and modularity on cultural stability. The second looks at the impact on cultural change if a biologically-advantageous variant emerges of a single cultural trait.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For more elaborate definitions see e.g. Whiten and Ham (1992) and Bryson (2009).

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Acknowledgements

This research was inspired by an informal talk by Dan Sperber in the Spring of 2008 at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, where I was supported by the institute as the Hans Przibram Fellow with sabbatical assistance from the University of Bath. Thanks to Christophe Heintz for his discussion and comments on the original version of this paper, which was also presented to The Fall AAAI Symposium on Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts (AACC’08), and appeared in its informal proceedings (A. Davis and J. Ludwig, eds). Thanks to that symposium also for their comments. Effort on completing the final version was sponsored by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Material Command, USAF, under grant number FA8655-10-1-3050.

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  1. University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK

    Joanna J. Bryson

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  1. Joanna J. Bryson
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Correspondence to Joanna J. Bryson .

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  1. Delft University of Technology, Delft, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Virginia Dignum

  2. Department of Information and Computing, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Frank Dignum

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Bryson, J.J. (2014). The Role of Stability in Cultural Evolution: Innovation and Conformity in Implicit Knowledge Discovery. In: Dignum, V., Dignum, F. (eds) Perspectives on Culture and Agent-based Simulations. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01952-9_10

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