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r rich in semantic information networks of social interactions material artefacts and persisting institutions many prominent cultural evolutionary models focus on the evolution of a few select cultural traits or traits that vary along a single dimension moreover when such models do build in more traits these typically are taken to evolve independently of one another within cultural evolutionary theory this strategy holds that the dynamics and structure of cultural evolutionary phenomena can be extrapolated from models that represent a small number of cultural traits interacting in independent or non epistatic processes this kind of strategy licences the modelling of simple trait systems either with an eye to describing the kinematics of those simple systems or to illuminate the evolution and operation of mechanisms underpinning their transmission 2 hence if students of literature want to think about culture as a phenomenon of evolutionary processes we will not find suitable models and methods in existing work on cultural evolution though we certainly need to be aware of and conversant with that work we are going to have to construct models and methods suitable to our material that is the primary objective of this essay to that end then i will be introducing a several of examples of work on cultural evolution in other domains biologists of course has been developing evolutionary theory over the last half century while they agree on basic issues many details are still under contention when we then as students of literary culture set out to adapt evolutionary theory to the analysis of literary phenomena just what do we take from biological thinking and how do we do it various approaches exist in the general cultural literature but this is hardly the place to sort through them though i have prepared a brief appendix with pointers into those discussions what moretti and sobchuk seem to have taken over is the distinction between tree like lineages and more chaotic network like lineages so that s where i will start where i am going though is toward an argument which says that that distinction is a reflection of the mechanisms that underlie the evolutionary process and it is to those mechanisms that we must look in adapting evolutionary theory to the study of human culture cultural evolution unfolds though collectivities of human minds and they give cultural evolution a different texture if you will and different large scale patterns references 1 on the direction of literary history how should we interpret that 3300 node graph in macroanalysis version 2 https www academia edu 40550795 on_the_direction_of_literary_history_how_should_we_interpret_that_3300_node_graph_in_macroanalysis_version_2 2 buskell a enquist m jansson f a systems approach to cultural evolution palgrave commun 5 131 2019 pp 4 5 doi 10 1057 s41599 019 0343 5 https rdcu be bvntp author bbenzon posted on 27 november 2019 27 november 2019 categories cultural evolution literary studies tags evolution phylogenies tree leave a comment on divergence and reticulation in cultural evolution a quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists i m currently working on a long article in which i review two recent critiques of computational criticism one by nan z da and the other by franco moretti and oleg sobchuk moretti and sobchuk introduce cultural evolution into their discussion but don t say much about it and i m suspect that their audience and mine is unfamiliar with current work in the area accordingly i ve decided to prepare a brief appendix to serve as a guide since i will be citing my own work in my article and further developing my views i do not mention it in this guide much of the recent work on cultural evolution is empirical researchers count things and see how they behave over time this work requires minimal commitment to a specific theory or model of how cultural evolution works that is perhaps wise as there is no consensus on how to relate the relevant biological concepts to cultural entities and processes these questions can help you organize and sort through the different conceptualizations 1 what is the target beneficiary of the evolutionary dynamic is it a human or collection of humans that benefits directly or is it the cultural entity itself directly is the key word as humans must ultimately benefit otherwise cultural evolution is just a waste of biological resources to the extent that there is a mainstream approach it is something called gene culture coevolution or dual inheritance theory in this approach humans are the direct beneficiaries of cultural success when richard dawkins proposed the meme as a cultural replicator in the selfish gene 1976 he proposed that the meme itself was the direct beneficiary of evolution this allows for a potential conflict between cultural and biological evolution a cultural trait like celibacy among the religious for example would seem to conflict with a biological imperative to reproduce 2 replication copying or re construction independently of the first question how is the cultural entity transmitted from one person to another is it a process of imitation or reconstruction genes replicate through a process of copying hence dawkins choice of a term meme to suggest that he sees genes as cultural replicators and many researchers agree with this in 1996 dan sperber published explaining culture in which he argued that no cultural entities aren t copied rather they re reconstructed hence instances will differ from one another 3 is there a meaningful distinction comparable to the biological distinction between phenotype and genotype as far as i can tell this distinction has little meaning for those focusing on empirical work they count what they can count and it doesn t seem to have much purchase among adherents of gene cultural coevolution or dual inheritance theory for these investigators we have populations of humans on the one hand and cultural entities on the other at this level of abstraction those cultural entities are all of the same kind the distinction comes into play when you take the position that cultural entities themselves are the direct beneficiaries of the evolutionary process dawkins sometimes talks of memes as though they are comparable to biological genes implying that there are phenotypic entities as well other times however he talks of memes as viruses in which case there is no phenotypic entity as far as i can tell sperber doesn t make this distinction either 4 are the genetic elements of culture inside people s heads or are they in the external environment dawkins was ambiguous on this point in the selfish gene there is a strong tendency to conceptualize culture s genetic entities if you will as being inside people s heads most meme advocates do and i believe that sperber and his followers do as well but one can take another position that the culture s genetic entities are in the external world in one form or another that s the position i take what to read i would recommend that humanists with no background in evolutionary thought start with gary taylor s cultural selection why some achievements survive the test of time and others don t basic books 1996 it side steps the theoretical mess around and about those four questions and discusses a lot of examples i read it years ago and so don t recall any specifics but this publisher s blurb seems reasonable taylor argues that culture is not what was done but what is remembered and that the social competition among different memories is as dynamic as the biological struggle for survival taylor builds his argument on a broad base of cultural achievements from michelangelo to frankenstein from shakespeare to casablanca from freud to invisible man he spans the continents to draw upon japanese literature native american history ancient greek philosophy and modern american architecture what s next i would suggest laland k m and g r brown sense and nonsense evolutionary perspectives on human behavior oxford university press 2002 that s the edition i read but there is a second edition published in 2011 laland and brown cover not only cultural evolution in its various conceptual forms but evolution and human behavior more generally including sociobiology behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology as i recall the title is apt sense and nonsense then you might want to look at a relatively short document 37 pp giving summaries and positions articulated in a workshop daniel dennett convened in 2010 it was held at the santa fe institute in new mexico participants dan dennett susan blackmore rob boyd nicolas cladière peter godfrey smith joseph henrich olivier morin peter richerson dan sperber and kim sterelny they run through various issues centered on the second question above the document is published by the international cognition culture institute founded by dan sperber as cultural evolution workshop 2010 at this link http cognitionandculture net ebooks you can download it as a pdf or ibook for gene culture coevolution and or dual inheritance i would recommend alexander mesoudi cultural evolution how darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences university of chicago press 2011 this is only moderately technical if you want to further investigate memetics you should start with dawkins the selfish gene it s been reissued several times any edition will do read the whole thing not just the memetics chapter that will give you a better understanding of what was on his mind when he posited the existence of memes once you ve read that you should read this paper jeremy trevelyan burman the misunderstanding of memes biography of an unscientific object 1976 1999 p erspectives on science 2012 vol 20 no 1 pp 75 104 burman explains how the concept went from a relatively informal and ambiguous idea to the popular concept of a viral agent moving from mind to mind also look at derek gatherer why the thought contagion metaphor is retarding the progress of memetics journal of memetics evolutionary models of transmission vol 2 1998 pp 1 21 http cfpm org jom emit 1998 vol2 gatherer_d html gatherer argues against the idea that culture s genetic elements are entities in the brain mind dan sperber s book explaining culture a naturalistic approach wiley 1996 is relatively short and quite readable he talks of an epidemiology of representations and adopts the term attractor from complex dynamics a cultural attractor is a bit like a platonic ideal though i suspect sperber would reject the comparison it is a form toward which cultural entities evolve according to factors of attraction these factors might be some psychological preferences and or environmental features that favor a cultural entity this approach has come to be known as cultural attraction theory cat for a different take on the subject you can read robert wright nonzero the logic of human destiny new york pantheon books 1999 wright is working outside the nexus of the four questions i ve listed above he takes a long view of human history from origins up to the present and argues that we are moving toward ever more sophisticated modes of cooperative interaction his title nonzero is a term from game theory a zero sum game is one where one party s gain is necessarily another party s loss a nonzero sum game in contrast is one where all parties can come out better than they were before entering into the interaction wright s other point of departure is an empirical literature in anthropology and archaeology that dates mostly to the third quarter of the previous century these scholars were interested in measuring the cultural complexity of existing but also historical societies and developed sophisticated statistical tools for doing so wright then argues that culture evolves toward more complex forms with more cooperative interactions between people as a bonus you might want to look through the archives of the listserve associated with the journal of memetics evolutionary models of information transmission which was published from 1997 to 2005 it was an online journal here http cfpm org jom emit the list is archived here http cfpm org majordom memetics about html archives finally the cultural evolution society was founded a couple of years ago https culturalevolutionsociety org author bbenzon posted on 20 november 2019 20 november 2019 categories uncategorized tags cultural evolution digital humanities humanities 2 comments on a quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists the computational envelope of language once more into the breach time to saddle up and once more ride my current hobby horse or one of them at least in this case the idea that natural language is the simplest aspect of human activity that is fundamentally and irreducibly computational in nature let s back into it is arithmetic calculation computational in kind well yes of course if anything is computation that sure is well then in my current view arithmetic calculation is language from which meaning has been completely removed squeezed out as it were leaving us with syntax morphology and so forth elaborate first let s remind ourselves that arithmetic calculation as performed by writing symbols on some surface is a very specialized form of language sure we think of it as something different from language all those years of drill and practice in primary school yes we have it drilled into our heads that arithmetic is one thing over here while language is something different over there but it s obvious isn t it that arithmetic is built from language ok i ll accept that so arithmetic calculation has two kinds of symbols numerals and operators both are finite in number numerals can be concatenated into strings of any length and in any order and combination ok in the standard arabic notation there are ten numerals zero 0 through 9 that s correct and we ve got five operators times and and come to think of it we probably should have left and right parenthesis as well ok what s the relationship between these two kinds of symbols hmmmm the operators allow as to specify various relationships between strings of numerals starting with yes starting with a basic set of equivalences of the form numstr op numstr numstr where op is one from and and numstr is a string of one or in the case of these primitive equivalences two numerals 1 thus giving us those tables we memorized in grade school right what do you mean by semantics being removed well what are the potentially meaning bearing elements in this collection that would be the numerals no yes what do they mean why they don t meaning anything well but they aren t completely empty are they no elaborate what s not empty about say 5 5 could designate by designate you mean mean yes 5 could designate any collection with five members 5 apples 5 oranges 5 mountains 5 stars what about an apple an orange a mountain a star and a dragon yes as long as there s five of them ah i see the numerals or str...