Mapping complex social transmission: technical constraints on the evolution of cultures

Verfasser / Beitragende:
[Mathieu Charbonneau]
Ort, Verlag, Jahr:
2015
Enthalten in:
Biology & Philosophy, 30/4(2015-07-01), 527-546
Format:
Artikel (online)
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024 7 0 |a 10.1007/s10539-015-9487-x  |2 doi 
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100 1 |a Charbonneau  |D Mathieu  |u KLI Institute, Martinstrasse 12, 3400, Klosterneuburg, Austria  |4 aut 
245 1 0 |a Mapping complex social transmission: technical constraints on the evolution of cultures  |h [Elektronische Daten]  |c [Mathieu Charbonneau] 
520 3 |a Social transmission is at the core of cultural evolutionary theory. It occurs when a demonstrator uses mental representations to produce some public displays (utterances, behaviors, artifacts, etc.) which in turn allow a learner to acquire similar mental representations. Although cultural evolutionists do not dispute this view of social transmission, they typically abstract away from the multistep nature of the process when they speak of cultural variants at large, thereby referring both to variation and evolutionary change in mental representations as well as in their corresponding public displays. This conflation suggests that differentiating each step of the transmission process is redundant. In this paper, I examine different forms of interplay between the multistep nature of social transmission and the metric spaces used by cultural evolutionists to measure cultural variation and to model cultural change. I offer a conceptual analysis of what assumptions seem to be at work when cultural evolutionists conflate the complex causal sequence of social transmission as a single space of variation in which populations evolve. To this aim, I use the framework of variation spaces, a formal framework commonly used in evolutionary biology, and I develop two theoretical concepts, ‘technique' and ‘technical space', for addressing cases where the complexity of social transmission defies the handy assumption of a single variation space for cultural change. 
540 |a Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2015 
690 7 |a Social transmission  |2 nationallicence 
690 7 |a Cultural evolution  |2 nationallicence 
690 7 |a Evolutionary constraints  |2 nationallicence 
690 7 |a Techniques  |2 nationallicence 
690 7 |a Palaeoarchaeology  |2 nationallicence 
773 0 |t Biology & Philosophy  |d Springer Netherlands  |g 30/4(2015-07-01), 527-546  |x 0169-3867  |q 30:4<527  |1 2015  |2 30  |o 10539 
856 4 0 |u https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-015-9487-x  |q text/html  |z Onlinezugriff via DOI 
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900 7 |a Metadata rights reserved  |b Springer special CC-BY-NC licence  |2 nationallicence 
908 |D 1  |a research-article  |2 jats 
949 |B NATIONALLICENCE  |F NATIONALLICENCE  |b NL-springer 
950 |B NATIONALLICENCE  |P 856  |E 40  |u https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-015-9487-x  |q text/html  |z Onlinezugriff via DOI 
950 |B NATIONALLICENCE  |P 100  |E 1-  |a Charbonneau  |D Mathieu  |u KLI Institute, Martinstrasse 12, 3400, Klosterneuburg, Austria  |4 aut 
950 |B NATIONALLICENCE  |P 773  |E 0-  |t Biology & Philosophy  |d Springer Netherlands  |g 30/4(2015-07-01), 527-546  |x 0169-3867  |q 30:4<527  |1 2015  |2 30  |o 10539