How to create a cultural species: Evaluating three proposals

ABSTRACT

This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our species offered by Cecilia Heyes in Cognitive Gadgets, Kevin Laland in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, and Michael Tomasello in Becoming Human. Our critical discussion focuses on the authors’ accounts of social learning, and the relationship each hypothesizes between cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary processes. We find that both Laland and Tomasello seek to explain cultural evolution in humans as reliant upon processes of joint attention and shared intentionality (the development of which is largely the focus of Tomasello’s book). Heyes’ account of social learning, in which no particular role is assigned to human intersubjectivity and the same basic associative learning mechanisms of nonsocial learning are also invoked to explain social learning, stands apart. As to the relation of cultural and biological evolution, Laland offers readers a thorough account of the two with detailed analyses of social learning across various non-primate species, and uniquely, among these authors, attends to the influence of genes on social learning. For his part, Tomasello provides readers with a richly detailed experimental accounting of human-unique forms of social learning using Great Apes as points of contrast.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural evolution
• Heyes
• Laland
• Tomasello
• social learning
• genetics

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation (Award #011972-00001) given to RN and HM.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In contrast to Heyes and Tomasello, Laland provides readers with an abundance of apt citations to substantiate claims he asserts across a huge variety of fields. We applaud this, though at inopportune times the scope of this gargantuan task gets away from him, leading to readers’ frustrations. Explicitly mentioning Boyd and Richerson, Laland discusses the importance of producing “conformity” through social learning (273) and appends a note (note 58 in Chapter 11). In a fact-checking effort we attempted to source this claim but found the reference to be to “Tomasello (1999)”. That this was a mistake is confirmed by the fact that Tomasello (1999) does not contain the word “conformity”. This is not the only case in which Laland’s citations were inaccurate.

2. Within the extensive body of work on biological and cultural mechanisms of language evolution (a case of cumulative culture par excellence), see the focus on the human coordinative capacity for shared intentionality in Burling (2012), Hurford (2012), and Tallerman (2012). Arbib (2012) focuses on the role of imitation in the evolution of language. See Fitch (2017) for an overview of the language evolution field.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation [Academic Cross-Training Fellowship #60704]; Borchard Foundation Center on International Education [105911 (awarded to H.M. & R.N.)].

Notes on contributors

Ryan Nichols

Ryan Nichols is a Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, and specializes in the cultural evolution of China.

Henrike Moll

Henrike Moll is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at University of Southern California and specializes in developmental psychology.

Jacob L Mackey

Jacob L. Mackey is an Assistant Professor of Classics in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture department at Occidental College. He specializes in cognitive approaches to Roman religion and culture.