The Potential to Infer the Historical Pattern of Cultural Macroevolution

Lukas, Dieter; Towner, Mary C.; Mulder, Monique Borgerhoff

doi:10.31235/osf.io/tjvgy

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…In principle, archaeological and paleoclimatic data could be incorporated into future analyses as ancestral states and exogenous variables, respectively (69). One concern in all phylogenetic studies of cultural evolution is that horizontal transmission between societies means that trait evolution is not strictly tree-like (vertical) (70,71). In principle, horizontal transmission should not bias our results: we estimated how changes in RI affect TSD, which does not depend on the mechanism of cultural change being vertical.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Novel phylogenetic methods reveal that resource-use intensification drives the evolution of “complex” societies

Ringen¹,

Martin²,

Jaeggi³

2021

Preprint

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Explaining the rise of large, sedentary populations, with attendant expansions of socio-political hierarchy and labor specialization (collectively referred to as “societal complexity”), is a central problem for social scientists and historians. Adoption of agriculture has often been invoked to explain the rise of complex societies, but archaeological and ethnographic records contradict simple agri-centric models. Rather than a unitary phenomenon, “complexity” may be better understood as a network of interacting features, which in turn have causal relationships with subsistence. Here we use novel comparative methods and a global sample of 186 nonindustrial societies to infer the role of subsistence practices in shaping complexity. We also introduce a phylogenetic method for causal inference that generalizes beyond two binary traits, lifting a major constraint on comparative research. We found that, rather than agriculture alone, a suite of resource-use intensification variables leads to broad increases in technological and social differentiation. Our study provides evidence that resource intensification is a leader, not a follower, in the rise of complex societies worldwide.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Novel phylogenetic methods reveal that resource-use intensification drives the evolution of “complex” societies

Ringen¹,

Martin²,

Jaeggi³

2021

Preprint

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“…The necessity to consider phylogenetic context when analyzing interspecies data has been widely adopted in many fields of biology, including ecology (e.g., Wu et al, 2021), animal behavior (e.g., Balasubramaniam et al, 2012), anthropology (e.g., Lukas, Towner and Borgerhoff Mulder, 2021) and conservation science (e.g., Fritz and Purvis, 2010). In contrast, in other sub-disciplines of biology, especially those which study phenomena at the cell or molecular level, phylogenetic statistical practices are less commonplace.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Response to Tcherkez and Farquhar: Rubisco adaptation is more limited by phylogenetic constraint than by catalytic trade-off

Bouvier

Kelly

2023

Preprint

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Rubisco is the primary entry point for carbon into the biosphere. It has been widely proposed that rubisco is highly constrained by catalytic trade-offs due to correlations between the enzyme's kinetic traits across species. In previous work, we have shown that these correlations, and thus the strength of catalytic trade-offs, have been over-estimated due to the presence of phylogenetic signal in the kinetic trait data (Bouvier et al., 2021). We demonstrated that only canonical trade-offs between the Michaelis constant for CO2 and carboxylase turnover, and between the Michaelis constants for CO2 and O2 were robust to phylogenetic effects. We further demonstrated that phylogenetic constraints have limited rubisco adaptation to a greater extent than the combined action of catalytic trade-offs. Recently, however, our claims have been contested by Tcherkez and Farquhar (2021), who have argued that the phylogenetic signal we detect in rubisco kinetic traits is an artefact of species sampling, the use of rbcL-based trees for phylogenetic inference, laboratory-to-laboratory variability in kinetic measurements, and homoplasy of the C4 trait. In the present article, we respond to these criticisms on a point-by-point basis and conclusively show that all are either incorrect or invalid. As such, we stand by our original conclusions. Specifically, the magnitude of rubisco catalytic trade-offs have been overestimated in previous analyses due to phylogenetic biases, and rubisco kinetic evolution has in fact been more limited by phylogenetic constraint.

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“…One way to get around these problems is to use the methods of phylogenetic analysis developed in evolutionary biology (T. E. Currie & Mace, 2012;Mace & Holden, 2005;Watts et al, 2015). However, this approach can be highly sensitive to assumptions underlying the phylogenetic analysis (Lukas et al 2021), as demonstrated by efforts to reconstruct the origins of the Indo-European linguistic family (Bouckaert et al, 2012) and the debates these have prompted (Anthony & Ringe, 2015;Chang et al, 2015;Pereltsvaig & Lewis, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: a test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank

Turchin

Whitehouse

Larson

et al. 2022

Religion, Brain & Behavior

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The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information designed to test theories concerning the evolutionary drivers of social complexity. In addition to the Big Gods hypothesis, which proposes that moralizing religion contributed to the success of increasingly large-scale complex societies, we consider the role of warfare, animal husbandry, and agricultural productivity in the rise of moralizing religions. Using a broad range of new measures of belief in moralizing supernatural punishment, we find strong support for previous research showing that such beliefs did not drive the rise of social complexity. By contrast, our analyses indicate that intergroup warfare, supported by resource availability, played a major role in the evolution of both social complexity and moralizing religions. Thus, the correlation between social complexity and moralizing religion would seem to result from shared evolutionary drivers, rather than from direct causal relationships between these two variables.

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The Potential to Infer the Historical Pattern of Cultural Macroevolution

Cited by 4 publications

References 51 publications

Novel phylogenetic methods reveal that resource-use intensification drives the evolution of “complex” societies

Novel phylogenetic methods reveal that resource-use intensification drives the evolution of “complex” societies

Response to Tcherkez and Farquhar: Rubisco adaptation is more limited by phylogenetic constraint than by catalytic trade-off

Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: a test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank

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