Human societies are collective brains. People within every society have cultural brains—brains that have evolved to selectively seek out adaptive knowledge and socially transmit solutions. Innovations emerge at a population level through the transmission of serendipitous mistakes, incremental improvements and novel recombinations. The rate of innovation through these mechanisms is a function of (1) a society's size and interconnectedness (sociality), which affects the number of models available for learning; (2) fidelity of information transmission, which affects how much information is lost during social learning; and (3) cultural trait diversity, which affects the range of possible solutions available for recombination. In general, and perhaps surprisingly, all three levers can increase and harm innovation by creating challenges around coordination, conformity and communication. Here, we focus on the ‘paradox of diversity’—that cultural trait diversity offers the largest potential for empowering innovation, but also poses difficult challenges at both an organizational and societal level. We introduce ‘cultural evolvability’ as a framework for tackling these challenges, with implications for entrepreneurship, polarization and a nuanced understanding of the effects of diversity. This framework can guide researchers and practitioners in how to reap the benefits of diversity by reducing costs. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.

In the last 12,000 years, human societies have scaled up from small bands to large states of millions and even billions. Many modern societies and even groups of societies cooperate on large-scale projects with relatively low levels of conflict, but the scale and intensity of cooperation varies dramatically between societies. Here we attempt to formalize dynamics that may be driving this rapid increase in cooperation and the differences we see between societies. Our model extends an N-person stag hunt to include population growth dynamics, "stags" with different sized payoffs, and competition for these stags. An increasing number of cooperators is required to access larger stags. The payoff from these stags in turn increases carrying capacity, which increases competition for the stag. As population size increases, new cooperative thresholds are attainable, and as population size shrinks, previously attainable thresholds fall out of reach. Among other predictions, we show that when a new threshold is accessible to a population, the level of cooperation will increase to reach this threshold. However, when the next threshold is out of reach, cooperation decreases as individuals refrain from costly cooperation, preferring a smaller stag. This model offers a framework for understanding the rapid increase in the scale of human cooperation and decline of violence, differences between societies, and challenges to future cooperation.