Collection 

Cultural evolution

Submission status
Closed
Submission deadline

Cultural evolution describes how socially learned ideas, rules, and skills are transmitted and change over time, giving rise to diverse forms of social organization, belief systems, languages, technologies and artistic traditions. This research article Collection will showcase cutting-edge research into cultural evolution, bringing together contributions that reflect the interdisciplinary scope of this rapidly growing field, as well as the diversity of topics and approaches within it.

Quantitative and qualitative research from a range of perspectives and disciplines is welcomed, including: sociology, archaeology, anthropology, complex network analysis, economics, history, linguistics, medical humanities, politics, psychology, philosophy, and religious studies.

Contributions are invited on, but not restricted to, the following themes:

  • Comparative studies of social learning and/or cultural transmission;
  • Evolution in human behaviour;
  • Cognitive anthropology;
  • Cultural attraction theory;
  • Experimental studies of cultural evolution;
  • Novel methodologies to study sociocultural evolution;
  • Quantitative/complex network analysis;
  • Modelling studies of cultural evolutionary dynamics;
  • Phylogenetic analysis of culture and language;
  • Gene-culture co-evolution and human niche construction;
  • Evolution of religious practices and beliefs;
  •  Real-world applications of cultural evolutionary knowledge — e.g. to grand societal challenges;
  •  Evolution of language and communication;
  • Philosophical perspectives on cultural evolution.
A pock-marked wall in painted in blue and yellow, with Hindi graffiti

Editors

Dr Elena Miu is a Researcher in the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. She is interested in understanding human behaviour, learning, and culture from an evolutionary perspective using a broad set of methods, with a particular focus on the evolution of cultural products. She has a background in linguistics, artificial intelligence, and biology, and has used theoretical modelling and large-scale experimental approaches to study the population-level dynamics of cumulative cultural evolution, as well as the individual-level decisions and learning mechanisms they arise from. She is currently working on questions related to the role of cultural transmission for the spread of low fertility norms using ethnographic data. Dr Miu has been a Guest Editor for this Collection since 2022.

 

Dr Joseph M. Stubbersfield is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Winchester, UK. He is interested in the role psychology and cognition play in the evolution of culture. Drawing on social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology, as well as cognitive anthropology, his research examines how biases in social learning and transmission processes influence both the content and propagation of information. Using a range of methodologies, including experiments, computational phylogeny and qualitative methods, he has used this approach to research and explain the dissemination of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends. Dr Stubbersfield has been a Guest Editor for this Collection since 2020.

 

 

 

Past Guest Editor: Dr Jamshid Tehrani, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, UK (2018-2020). Dr Tehrani was the first Guest Editor of this Collection.