Promiscuous Inventions: Modeling Cultural Evolution with Multiple Inheritance

• In Event: 099 - Section on Mathematical Sociology Paper Session. Open Topic on Mathematical Sociology

Abstract

Powerful tools from macroevolution have been used to reconstruct cultural evolution in variety of spheres. Yet these methods bracket the horizontal transmission between “lineages” facilitated by human communication and population movement. In the case of modern technology, scholars often assume recombinant processes and substantial horizontal transfer, suggesting that standard phylogenetic methods are often inappropriate. Here, we sketch an exploratory framework and a class of generative models that enable rich historical data to reveal the nature of cultural inheritance, beginning with which and how many “parents” influence each idea or invention. Hence, our model describes a general process of combinatorial evolution, allowing one or multiple ancestors to provide the raw materials (features) for a given observation. We focus on inference of the directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that trace the inheritance of known features, rather than inference of the features themselves. Temporal and geographical constraints on the space of plausible DAGs naturally enforce the time-directedness and localization of inheritance. Groups of parent technologies can “mate” with each other according to range of criteria, including fitness or past fecundity. We show that this approach can apply to a range of cultural phenomena, including the evolution of technology, organizations, genres and art forms, as well as the changing cultural constitution of individual human beings. We conclude by describing the relationship between the mode of cultural evolution revealed by this approach (branching or reticulate) and the mixture of Transmission Isolating Mechanisms (TRIMS) and Transmission Accelerating Mechanisms (TRAMS) that together pattern cultural evolution.

Authors

• Jacob Gates Foster, University of California-Los Angeles

• James A. Evans, University of Chicago