The Evolutionary Dynamics of Cultural Change (As Told Through the Birth and Brutal, Blackened Death of Metal Music)

Abstract

When, how, and why does culture change over time? Sociological theory and mechanisms to explain cultural change are underdeveloped. This study links contemporary sociological theories of culture to a burgeoning cultural evolution literature emerging across other social sciences. By shifting our analytical focus from social actors to cultural representations and material "cultural things," our theory is able to explain change over large and long frames of analysis using formal evolutionary mechanisms. Complementing this theory, the paper introduces a suite of novel methods to explain change in the historical trajectories of populations of cultural things (e.g., musical groups, hashtags, laws, technologies, and organizations) through diversification rates. We deploy our theory and methods to study the history of Metal Music over more than four decades, using a complete dataset of all bands active between 1968-2000. Over the course of its history, we find strong evidence that the genre has been fundamentally shaped by competition for the cognitive resources actors can invest in learning about and reproducing this cultural form over time.

Welcome to the Real World: Escaping the Sociology of Culture and Cognition

“…Scholars are also investigating changes in forms of culture like books of music. Sociologists (Koch, Silvestro, and Foster 2020) and non-sociologists (Brand, Acerbi, and Mesoudi 2019) are using evolutionary models to investigate patterns of cultural change. Even in traditionally humanist fields like English, scholars are using computational techniques to understand literary change at massive scale (Underwood 2019).…”

Analysing the Diversification of Cultural Variants using Longitudinal Richness Data

“…Diversification rate analysis is performed on both the complete and incomplete pseudo-data created from our simulation models using a unsupervised, machine learning algorithm known as "LiteRate" [18]. The program LiteRate models diversification rates using a probabilistic framework based on a linear birth-death process.…”

“…They have long served as a valuable tool in paleobiology for understanding the mode and tempo of evolutionary patterns [43,33,37,45,26,38,10,34,29,30], and whether the changes in taxonomic diversity over time are due to intrinsic causes (emergence of a new feature) or extrinsic causes (a changing environment) or a combination of both [44, p. 6187]. When applied to cultural evolution, diversification rate analysis broadly aims to capture the dynamics of when cultural variants are "born" through innovation and when cultural variants "die" from no longer being used and forgotten [18]. However, knowing the values of origination and extinction rates over time may not per se allow for conclusions about the underlying evolutionary processes producing the observed longitudinal richness data.…”

Towards a model of urban evolution I: context

“…Similarly, Koch, Silvestro, and Foster (2020) argue that recent sociological theories of cultural change have tended to rely on notions of purposeful activity (such as the activism of social movements) or exogenous shocks (such as major events that delegitimize accepted conventions) while paying relatively little attention to endogenous changes across populations of actors. They contend that an evolutionary theory of culture meets the conditions for a general sociological theory of cultural change, by specifying key criteria any theory must meet, such as: a material basis (e.g.…”

“…A model of urban evolution holds a similar synthetic promise of a general theory of urban change. As in Aldrich, Silvestro, and Foster (2020), it encompasses insights from other perspectives on urban change, such as ecological or diffusion models, while meeting the general criteria for a successful theory of change outlined by Koch, Silvestro, and Foster (2020). For example, our model defines the material basis of urban change not in cultural forms but in urban forms ("the formeme"), elaborates mechanisms for the emergence, selection, retention, and transmission of variants, and provides analytical tools for examining these processes as an outcome of interactions between urban forms, and the expectations they have of their users, and human users, and the expectations they have of urban forms.…”