Evolved Open-Endedness in Cultural Evolution: A New Dimension in Open-Ended Evolution Research.

The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be." The study and pursuit of open-ended evolution in artificial evolutionary systems exemplify this goal. However, open-ended evolution research is hampered by two fundamental issues: the struggle to replicate open-endedness in an artificial evolutionary system and our assumption that we only have one system (genetic evolution) from which to draw inspiration. We argue not only that cultural evolution should be seen as another real-world example of an open-ended evolutionary system but that the unique qualities seen in cultural evolution provide us with a new perspective from which we can assess the fundamental properties of, and ask new questions about, open-ended evolutionary systems, especially with regard to evolved open-endedness and transitions from bounded to unbounded evolution. Here we provide an overview of culture as an evolutionary system, highlight the interesting case of human cultural evolution as an open-ended evolutionary system, and contextualize cultural evolution by developing a new framework of (evolved) open-ended evolution. We go on to provide a set of new questions that can be asked once we consider cultural evolution within the framework of open-ended evolution and introduce new insights that we may be able to gain about evolved open-endedness as a result of asking these questions.

Fidelity, stances, and explaining cultural stability.

The bifocal stance theory posits two stances - the ritual and the instrumental - each a learning strategy with different fidelity outcomes. These differences in turn have long-term consequences for cultural stability. Yet we suggest the key concept of "fidelity" is insufficiently explicated. Pointing to counterexamples and gaps in the theory, we suggest that explicating "fidelity" reveals the stances to be heuristic explanatory strategies: first-pass explanatory glosses of learning and its consequences, not descriptions of the inner machinery of agents.

Cognitive novelties, informational form, and structural-causal explanations.

Recent work has established a framework for explaining the origin of cognitive novelties-qualitatively distinct cognitive traits-in human beings. This niche construction approach argues that humans engineer epistemic environments in ways that facilitate the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of such novelties. I here argue that attention to the organized relations between content-carrying informational vehicles, or informational form, is key to a valuable explanatory strategy within this project, what I call structural-causal explanations. Drawing on recent work from Cecilia Heyes, and developing a case study around a novel mathematical capacity, I demonstrate how structural-causal explanations can contribute to the niche construction approach by underwriting the application of explanatory tools and generating new empirical targets.

Normativity, social change, and the epistemological framing of culture.

The authors deploy an epistemic framework to represent culture and model the acquisition of cultural behavior. Yet, the framing inherits familiar problems with explaining the acquisition of norms. Such problems are conspicuous with regard to human societies where norms are ubiquitous. This creates a new difficulty for the authors in explaining change to mutually exclusive organizational structures of human life.

Synthesising arguments and the extended evolutionary synthesis.

Synthesising arguments motivate changes to the conceptual tools, theoretical structure, and evaluatory framework employed in a given scientific domain. Recently, a broad coalition of researchers has put forward a synthesising argument in favour of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis ('EES'). Often this synthesising argument is evaluated using a virtue-based approach, which construes the EES as a wholesale alternative to prevailing practice. Here I argue this virtue-based approach is not fit for purpose. Taking the central concept of niche construction as a case study, I show that an agenda-based approach better captures the pragmatic and epistemological goals of the EES synthesising argument and diagnoses areas of empirical disagreement with prevailing practice.

Looking for middle ground in cultural attraction theory.

In their article, Thom Scott-Phillips, Stefaan Blancke, and Christophe Heintz do a commendable job summarizing the position and misunderstandings of "cultural attraction theory" (CAT). However, they do not address a longstanding problem for the CAT framework; that while it has an encompassing theory and some well-worked out case studies, it lacks tools for generating models or empirical hypotheses of intermediate generality. I suggest that what the authors diagnose as misunderstandings are instead superficial interpretive errors, resulting from researchers who have attempted to extract generalizable hypotheses from CAT and bring them into contact with the analytical and inferential models of contemporary cultural evolutionary research.

What are cultural attractors?

Concepts from cultural attractor theory are now used in domains far from their original home in anthropology and cultural evolution. Yet these concepts have not been consistently characterised. I here distinguish four ways in which the cultural attractor concept has been used and identify three kinds of factors of attraction typically appealed to. Clarifying these explanatory concepts identifies problems and ambiguities in the work of cultural epidemiologists and commentators alike.

Domains of generality.

We argue that general intelligence, as presented in the target article, generates multiple distinct and non-equivalent characterisations. Clarifying this central concept is necessary for assessing Burkart et al.'s proposal that the cultural intelligence hypothesis is the best explanation for the evolution of general intelligence. We assess this claim by considering two characterisations of general intelligence presented in the article.