caa a22 4500 60544840X CHVBK 20210128100136.0 cr unu---uuuuu 210128e20150701xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s10539-015-9487-x doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s10539-015-9487-x Charbonneau Mathieu KLI Institute, Martinstrasse 12, 3400, Klosterneuburg, Austria aut Mapping complex social transmission: technical constraints on the evolution of cultures [Elektronische Daten] [Mathieu Charbonneau] 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. Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2015 Social transmission nationallicence Cultural evolution nationallicence Evolutionary constraints nationallicence Techniques nationallicence Palaeoarchaeology nationallicence Biology & Philosophy Springer Netherlands 30/4(2015-07-01), 527-546 0169-3867 30:4<527 2015 30 10539 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-015-9487-x text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-015-9487-x text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Charbonneau Mathieu KLI Institute, Martinstrasse 12, 3400, Klosterneuburg, Austria aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Biology & Philosophy Springer Netherlands 30/4(2015-07-01), 527-546 0169-3867 30:4<527 2015 30 10539