Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability

Uchiyama, Ryutaro; Spicer, Rachel; Muthukrishna, Michael

doi:10.1101/2020.06.23.167676

Cited by 13 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 230 publications

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“…Within-population diversity includes disciplinary differences, such as the sciences and humanities, industry specializations [51], guilds and firms [41]. Diversity can also be structured as ‘cultural clusters’ by ethnicity, class, wealth, occupation, political alignment, religion or incidental geographical layout [52]. Cultural clusters may intersect, such as in ethnic occupation specialization [53].…”

Section: Trade-offs In the Collective Brainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paradox of diversity in the collective brain

Schimmelpfennig

Razek

Schnell

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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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’.

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Section: Trade-offs In the Collective Brainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paradox of diversity in the collective brain

Schimmelpfennig

Razek

Schnell

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

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“…Though some studies of individual differences in WEIRD populations acknowledge that findings may not generalize (Smith-Woolley et al, 2018), neglecting how human environments are extensively shaped by cultural and historical dynamics can lead to stigmatizing individuals and groups underperforming on WEIRD cognitive tests. It can also lead to inflated heritability estimates for cognitive abilities (Uchiyama et al, 2020) and a focus on research that overlooks the trade-offs of FS (Davis & Cashdan, 2019;Pope et al, 2019;Reyes-García et al, 2010;Sternberg et al, 2001). Even in WEIRD societies, the impacts of being raised in homes, families, and communities where the FS pedagogy is not heavily embedded may be further reaching than previously assumed.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This mismatch affects the relevancy and translatability of standardized assessments in diverse settings (P. M. Greenfield, 1997;Medin et al, 2010), raising questions regarding the validity of results (Ebbesen, 2020). By applying frameworks that incorporate culturally contextualized learning (Legare et al, 2015;Uchiyama et al, 2020), a new wave of interdisciplinary, experimental work aims to address these issues when investigating culture and cognition (Hruschka et al, 2018;Van Leeuwen et al, 2018). Regarding FS and cognitive skill development specifically, in-depth experimental studies have been conducted in schooled and unschooled populations (e.g.…”

Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

The formal schooling niche: Longitudinal evidence from Bolivian Amazon demonstrates that higher school quality augments differences in children's abstract reasoning.

He¹,

Stieglitz²,

Kaplan³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Though schooling is robustly associated with children’s cognitive performance gains, the magnitude of its effect remains unclear because access to quality schooling covaries with socioeconomic status (SES), health, and other environmental factors. Utilizing a natural experiment, we assess children’s abstract reasoning, widely considered predictive of academic achievement, longitudinally in a rural Bolivian subsistence population with considerable variability in school quality, but minimal variability in SES and child nutritional status. Among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists (n=290 children aged 8-18 years; 44% female), we use Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) to evaluate whether abstract reasoning is predicted by school quality and individual characteristics including attendance, school-derived skills (i.e. reading ability, arithmetic ability), child nutritional status (i.e. weight-for-height), and family-level factors including parental education and wealth. We also evaluate predictors of prospective change in children’s RCPM score after a brief training session approximately one month following baseline RCPM assessment, and four years later. Relative to children attending low quality schools, children attending higher quality schools (e.g. government trained teachers, classroom materials) have greater reading ability, score higher on RCPM at baseline, and show greater improvement in RCPM score after training. Reading ability and school attendance positively predict baseline RCPM score and their relationship to RCPM is moderated by school quality. School quality and weight-for-height have the largest effect prospectively on RCPM score among children who stayed in school throughout the study. These findings suggest school quality is a more important causal determinant of abstract reasoning than school attendance or certain scholastic skills.

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“…Generally speaking, an adaptation at one level could become an exaptation at another level, as the unit of selection pertains to all the different levels of biological organization ( Lewontin, 1970 ). Interestingly, cross-level mechanisms could represent an interface between nature and culture ( Uchiyama et al, 2020 ), where genetic adaptations could be culturally exapted. For instance, skin pigmentation—a genetic adaptation (a protection against UV radiation)—has been culturally exapted to become a signal of socio-economic status, because over centuries light pigmentation was a signal of high socio-economic status and prestige.…”

Section: The Exaptive Origins Of Rationalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

More Thumbs Than Rules: Is Rationality an Exaptation?

et al. 2022

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The literatures on bounded and ecological rationality are built on adaptationism—and its associated modular, cognitivist and computational paradigm—that does not address or explain the evolutionary origins of rationality. We argue that the adaptive mechanisms of evolution are not sufficient for explaining human rationality, and we posit that human rationality presents exaptive origins, where exaptations are traits evolved for other functions or no function at all, and later co-opted for new uses. We propose an embodied reconceptualization of rationality—embodied rationality—based on the reuse of the perception-action system, where many neural processes involved in the control of the sensory-motor system, salient in ancestral environments have been later co-opted to create—by tinkering—high-level reasoning processes, employed in civilized niches.

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Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability

Cited by 13 publications

References 230 publications

Paradox of diversity in the collective brain

Paradox of diversity in the collective brain

The formal schooling niche: Longitudinal evidence from Bolivian Amazon demonstrates that higher school quality augments differences in children's abstract reasoning.

More Thumbs Than Rules: Is Rationality an Exaptation?

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