Punctuated equilibria in cultural evolution
| Thesis title in Czech: | Přerušované rovnováhy v kulturní evoluci |
|---|---|
| Thesis title in English: | Punctuated equilibria in cultural evolution |
| Key words: | přerušované rovnováhy, kumulativní kulturní evoluce, technologické změny, ekonomický růst, paleolit |
| English key words: | punctuated equilibria, cumulative cultural evolution, technological change, economic growth, Paleolithic |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2020/2021 |
| Thesis type: | diploma thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Philosophy and History of Science (31-107) |
| Supervisor: | Mgr. Petr Tureček, Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned by the advisor, waiting for guarantor's approval |
| Date of registration: | 15.11.2020 |
| Date of assignment: | 15.11.2020 |
| Preliminary scope of work |
| Klasické narativy ekonomické historie a prehistorie kladou důraz na střídající se období relativní stagnace a období charakterizovaná náhlými, explozivními technologickými, ekonomickými a společenskými změnami. Typickými příklady dynamických etap vývoje lidstva jsou průmyslová revoluce (Clark 2008; Mokyr 2016), neolitická revoluce (Bar-Yosef 1998)a revoluce svrchního paleolitu (Powell, Shennan, and Thomas 2009; Bar-Yosef 2002). Tyto vzorce pokroku jsou modelovány jako série oddělených exponenciálních procesů (Enquist et al. 2008; Hanson 2000), ale i jako dlouhodobý hyperbolický růst se stochastickým šumem (Kremer 1993). V posledních letech dochází k produktivní syntéze těchto ekonomických modelů s modely kumulativní kulturní evoluce, z nichž některé (např. Mokyr 1990; Kolodny, Creanza, and Feldman 2015; Aoki 2015) se pokouší zahrnout vzorec přerušovaných rovnováh známých z biologické evoluce (Gould and Eldredge 1972). Zároveň bylo identifikováno několik vstupních parametrů, které tyto vzorce ovlivňují: - velikost populace (Henrich 2004; Kremer 1993; Collard et al. 2013; Kline and Boyd 2010) - externí šoky, např. klimatické změny (Dow and Reed 2011; Richerson, Boyd, and Bettinger 2001) - hustota populace a konektivita subpopulací (Powell, Shennan, and Thomas 2009; Derex and Mesoudi 2020; Greenbaum et al. 2019; Creanza, Kolodny, and Feldman 2017), - věrnost přenosu informací (Lewis and Laland 2012), - frekvence technologických inovací a jejich následných rekombinací (Kolodny, Creanza, and Feldman 2016; Kuhn 2012), - vývoj kulturních norem ovlivňující parametry kulturní akumulace, např. normy kolem soukromého vlastnictví (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005) - stochastický růst kulturní variability (Tureček et al. 2019) Ambicí této práce bude rozvinout “saltacionistický” model růstu kulturní komplexity(Kolodny, Creanza, and Feldman 2015) (a) zakomponovaním empiricky realistických parametrů pro: - velikost populace a konektivity subpopulací(Sjödin et al. 2012; Morris 2013) - časová rozmezí - metriky komplexity technologického repertoáru, např. u lovecko-sběračských(Oswalt 1972; Collared, Kemery, and Banks 2005)a raně neolitických společností - Klimatické podmínky - Odhady energetických zisků na jedince(Morris 2013) - Kvantifikaci parametrů kulturní evoluce, např. věrnost přenosu informací(Kempe, Lycett, and Mesoudi 2014; Candia et al. 2019) (b) kalibrovat model tak, aby byl konzistentní s historickým vývojem společností anatomicky moderních lidí, např. - Relativní stagnace před mladým paleolitem i neolitem - Paralelním vývojem lidského kulturního repertoáru v Austrálii a Oceánii(Brumm and Moore 2005) - Konvergentním vývojem zemědělství v několika izolovaných populacích v Evropě, západní a východní Asii i Africe (c) pokusit se o syntézu s dalšími modely, např. modely difuze inovací na sítích nebo modely investic do učení nových dovedností Reference: Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2005. “Chapter 6 Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth.” InHandbook of Economic Growth, edited by Philippe Aghion and Steven N. Durlauf, 1:385–472. Elsevier. Aoki, Kenichi. 2015. “Modeling Abrupt Cultural Regime Shifts during the Palaeolithic and Stone Age.”Theoretical Population Biology100 (March): 6–12. Bar-Yosef, Ofer. 1998. “The Natufian Culture in the Levant, Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture.”Evolutionary Anthropology6 (5): 159–77. ———. 2002. “The Upper Paleolithic Revolution.”Annual Review of Anthropology31 (1): 363–93. Brumm, Adam, and Mark W. Moore. 2005. “Symbolic Revolutions and the Australian Archaeological Record.”Cambridge Archaeological Journal15 (2): 157–75. Candia, Cristian, C. Jara-Figueroa, Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert, Albert-László Barabási, and César A. Hidalgo. 2019. “The Universal Decay of Collective Memory and Attention.”Nature Human Behaviour3 (1): 82–91. Clark, Gregory. 2008.A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press. Collard, Mark, April Ruttle, Briggs Buchanan, and Michael J. O’Brien. 2013. “Population Size and Cultural Evolution in Nonindustrial Food-Producing Societies.”PloS One8 (9): e72628. Collared, Mark, Michael Kemery, and Samantha Banks. 2005. “Causes of Toolkit Variation Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Test of Four Competing Hypotheses.”Canadian Journal of Archaeology / Journal Canadien d’Archéologie29 (1): 1–19. Creanza, Nicole, Oren Kolodny, and Marcus W. Feldman. 2017. “Greater than the Sum of Its Parts? Modelling Population Contact and Interaction of Cultural Repertoires.”Journal of the Royal Society, Interface / the Royal Society14 (130). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0171. Derex, Maxime, and Alex Mesoudi. 2020. “Cumulative Cultural Evolution within Evolving Population Structures.”Trends in Cognitive Sciences24 (8): 654–67. Dow, Gregory K., and Clyde G. Reed. 2011. “Stagnation and Innovation before Agriculture.”Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization77 (3): 339–50. Enquist, M., S. Ghirlanda, A. Jarrick, and C-A Wachtmeister. 2008. “Why Does Human Culture Increase Exponentially?”Theoretical Population Biology74 (1): 46–55. Gould, Niles Eldredge-Stephen Jay, and Niles Eldredge. 1972. “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.”Essential Readings in Evolutionary Biology, 82–115. Greenbaum, Gili, David E. Friesem, Erella Hovers, Marcus W. Feldman, and Oren Kolodny. 2019. “Was Inter-Population Connectivity of Neanderthals and Modern Humans the Driver of the Upper Paleolithic Transition rather than Its Product?”Quaternary Science Reviews217 (August): 316–29. Hanson, Robin. 2000. “Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes.”https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf. Henrich, Joseph. 2004. “Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses: The Tasmanian Case.”American Antiquity69 (2): 197–214. Kempe, Marius, Stephen J. Lycett, and Alex Mesoudi. 2014. “From Cultural Traditions to Cumulative Culture: Parameterizing the Differences between Human and Nonhuman Culture.”Journal of Theoretical Biology359 (October): 29–36. Kline, Michelle A., and Robert Boyd. 2010. “Population Size Predicts Technological Complexity in Oceania.”Proceedings. Biological Sciences277 (1693): 2559–64. Kolodny, Oren, Nicole Creanza, and Marcus W. Feldman. 2015. “Evolution in Leaps: The Punctuated Accumulation and Loss of Cultural Innovations.”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America112 (49): E6762–69. ———. 2016. “Game-Changing Innovations: How Culture Can Change the Parameters of Its Own Evolution and Induce Abrupt Cultural Shifts.”PLoS Computational Biology12 (12): e1005302. Kremer, Michael. 1993. “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990 *.”The Quarterly Journal of Economics108 (3): 681–716. Kuhn, Steven L. 2012. “Emergent Patterns of Creativity and Innovation in Early Technologies.” InDevelopments in Quaternary Sciences, 69–87. Developments in Quaternary Science. Elsevier. Lewis, Hannah M., and Kevin N. Laland. 2012. “Transmission Fidelity Is the Key to the Build-up of Cumulative Culture.”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences367 (1599): 2171–80. Mokyr, Joel. 1990. “Punctuated Equilibria and Technological Progress.”The American Economic Review80 (2): 350–54. ———. 2016.A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton University Press. Morris, Ian. 2013.The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton University Press. Oswalt, Wendell H. 1972.Habitat and Technology: The Evolution of Hunting. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Powell, Adam, Stephen Shennan, and Mark G. Thomas. 2009. “Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior.”Science324 (5932): 1298–1301. Richerson, Peter J., Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger. 2001. “Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis.”American Antiquity66 (3): 387–411. Sjödin, Per, Agnès E Sjöstrand, Mattias Jakobsson, and Michael G. B. Blum. 2012. “Resequencing Data Provide No Evidence for a Human Bottleneck in Africa during the Penultimate Glacial Period.”Molecular Biology and Evolution29 (7): 1851–60. Tureček, Petr, Jakub Slavík, Michal Kozák, and Jan Havlíček. 2019. “Non-Particulate Inheritance Revisited: Evolution in Systems with Parental Variability-Dependent Inheritance.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. Linnean Society of London 127 (2): 518–33. |
| Preliminary scope of work in English |
| Traditional accounts of human economic history and pre-history accent periods of relative stagnation followed by rapid technological, economic and social change. Examples of such periods include the Industrial (Clark 2008; Mokyr 2016), Neolithic (Bar-Yosef 1998)and Upper Paleolithic (Powell, Shennan, and Thomas 2009; Bar-Yosef 2002)“revolutions”. There is broad agreement that the cultural, economic and technological output of Homo sapiens has been increasing in complexity at least exponentially (Enquist et al. 2008), if not hyperbolically(Kremer 1993)for at least tens of thousands of years. However, this long-run growth seems to manifest as a series of “bumps” (“punctuated equilibria”, “changing growth modes” (Mokyr 1990; Kolodny, Creanza, and Feldman 2015). There is a large variety of quantitative models and qualitative explanations for the underlying drivers of this cumulative growth. These models accent, among other parameters, the effects of population size (Henrich 2004; Kremer 1993; Collard et al. 2013; Kline and Boyd 2010), patterns of connectivity and population density (Powell, Shennan, and Thomas 2009; Derex and Mesoudi 2020; Greenbaum et al. 2019), fidelity of cultural transmission (Lewis and Laland 2012), “lucky-leap” inventions resulting from recombinations in the pool of ideas (Kolodny, Creanza, and Feldman 2016; Kuhn 2012), norms and institutions incentivizing cooperation (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005)or increasing variability of cultural traits (Tureček et al. 2019) The ambition of this thesis will be to extend the “saltationist” model of growth in cultural complexity (Kolodny, Creanza, and Feldman 2015) by (a) incorporating empirically realistic parameters for: - population size, density, and connectivity (Sjödin et al. 2012; Morris 2013) - timeframes - measures of technological complexity in hunter-gatherer (Oswalt 1972; Collared, Kemery, and Banks 2005)and early neolithic societies - temperature and other climatic variables - historical estimates of energy capture (Morris 2013) - parameters of cultural evolution itself, such as transmission fidelity and rates of cultural loss (b) calibrating the model to be consistent with patterns observed in prehistoric societies of anatomically modern humans (AMH), for example - The relative stagnation between divergence of AMH and the Upper Paleolithic transition - The archaeological record of parallel cultural developments in Australia - The convergent emergence of agriculture in a number of isolated societies (c) attempt a synthesis with related models, e.g. models of diffusion of innovations on networks or models of costly investment in skill acquisition and innovation. References: Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2005. “Chapter 6 Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth.” InHandbook of Economic Growth, edited by Philippe Aghion and Steven N. Durlauf, 1:385–472. Elsevier. Aoki, Kenichi. 2015. “Modeling Abrupt Cultural Regime Shifts during the Palaeolithic and Stone Age.”Theoretical Population Biology100 (March): 6–12. Bar-Yosef, Ofer. 1998. “The Natufian Culture in the Levant, Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture.”Evolutionary Anthropology6 (5): 159–77. ———. 2002. “The Upper Paleolithic Revolution.”Annual Review of Anthropology31 (1): 363–93. Brumm, Adam, and Mark W. Moore. 2005. “Symbolic Revolutions and the Australian Archaeological Record.”Cambridge Archaeological Journal15 (2): 157–75. Candia, Cristian, C. Jara-Figueroa, Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert, Albert-László Barabási, and César A. Hidalgo. 2019. “The Universal Decay of Collective Memory and Attention.”Nature Human Behaviour3 (1): 82–91. Clark, Gregory. 2008.A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press. Collard, Mark, April Ruttle, Briggs Buchanan, and Michael J. O’Brien. 2013. “Population Size and Cultural Evolution in Nonindustrial Food-Producing Societies.”PloS One8 (9): e72628. Collared, Mark, Michael Kemery, and Samantha Banks. 2005. “Causes of Toolkit Variation Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Test of Four Competing Hypotheses.”Canadian Journal of Archaeology / Journal Canadien d’Archéologie29 (1): 1–19. Creanza, Nicole, Oren Kolodny, and Marcus W. Feldman. 2017. “Greater than the Sum of Its Parts? Modelling Population Contact and Interaction of Cultural Repertoires.”Journal of the Royal Society, Interface / the Royal Society14 (130). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0171. Derex, Maxime, and Alex Mesoudi. 2020. “Cumulative Cultural Evolution within Evolving Population Structures.”Trends in Cognitive Sciences24 (8): 654–67. Dow, Gregory K., and Clyde G. Reed. 2011. “Stagnation and Innovation before Agriculture.”Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization77 (3): 339–50. Enquist, M., S. Ghirlanda, A. Jarrick, and C-A Wachtmeister. 2008. “Why Does Human Culture Increase Exponentially?”Theoretical Population Biology74 (1): 46–55. Gould, Niles Eldredge-Stephen Jay, and Niles Eldredge. 1972. “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.”Essential Readings in Evolutionary Biology, 82–115. Greenbaum, Gili, David E. Friesem, Erella Hovers, Marcus W. Feldman, and Oren Kolodny. 2019. “Was Inter-Population Connectivity of Neanderthals and Modern Humans the Driver of the Upper Paleolithic Transition rather than Its Product?”Quaternary Science Reviews217 (August): 316–29. Hanson, Robin. 2000. “Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes.”https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf. Henrich, Joseph. 2004. “Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses: The Tasmanian Case.”American Antiquity69 (2): 197–214. Kempe, Marius, Stephen J. Lycett, and Alex Mesoudi. 2014. “From Cultural Traditions to Cumulative Culture: Parameterizing the Differences between Human and Nonhuman Culture.”Journal of Theoretical Biology359 (October): 29–36. Kline, Michelle A., and Robert Boyd. 2010. “Population Size Predicts Technological Complexity in Oceania.”Proceedings. Biological Sciences277 (1693): 2559–64. Kolodny, Oren, Nicole Creanza, and Marcus W. Feldman. 2015. “Evolution in Leaps: The Punctuated Accumulation and Loss of Cultural Innovations.”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America112 (49): E6762–69. ———. 2016. “Game-Changing Innovations: How Culture Can Change the Parameters of Its Own Evolution and Induce Abrupt Cultural Shifts.”PLoS Computational Biology12 (12): e1005302. Kremer, Michael. 1993. “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990 *.”The Quarterly Journal of Economics108 (3): 681–716. Kuhn, Steven L. 2012. “Emergent Patterns of Creativity and Innovation in Early Technologies.” InDevelopments in Quaternary Sciences, 69–87. Developments in Quaternary Science. Elsevier. Lewis, Hannah M., and Kevin N. Laland. 2012. “Transmission Fidelity Is the Key to the Build-up of Cumulative Culture.”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences367 (1599): 2171–80. Mokyr, Joel. 1990. “Punctuated Equilibria and Technological Progress.”The American Economic Review80 (2): 350–54. ———. 2016.A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton University Press. Morris, Ian. 2013.The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton University Press. Oswalt, Wendell H. 1972.Habitat and Technology: The Evolution of Hunting. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Powell, Adam, Stephen Shennan, and Mark G. Thomas. 2009. “Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior.”Science324 (5932): 1298–1301. Richerson, Peter J., Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger. 2001. “Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis.”American Antiquity66 (3): 387–411. Sjödin, Per, Agnès E Sjöstrand, Mattias Jakobsson, and Michael G. B. Blum. 2012. “Resequencing Data Provide No Evidence for a Human Bottleneck in Africa during the Penultimate Glacial Period.”Molecular Biology and Evolution29 (7): 1851–60. Tureček, Petr, Jakub Slavík, Michal Kozák, and Jan Havlíček. 2019. “Non-Particulate Inheritance Revisited: Evolution in Systems with Parental Variability-Dependent Inheritance.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. Linnean Society of London 127 (2): 518–33. |