Partial connectivity increases cultural accumulation within groups
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Significance: The remarkable ecological success of the human species has been attributed to our capacity to overcome environmental challenges through the development of complex technologies. Complex technologies are typically beyond the inventive capacities of individuals and result from a population process by which innovations are gradually added to existing cultural traits across many generations. Recent work suggests that a population’s ability to develop technologies is positively affected by its size and connectedness. Here, we present an experiment demonstrating that partially connected groups produce more diverse and complex cultural traits than fully connected groups. This result suggests that changes in patterns of interaction between human groups may have created propitious conditions for the emergence of complex cultural repertoires in our evolutionary past.
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Spatial heterogeneity enforces isolation and therefore diversity within a population, while adaptability ensures that environmental barriers can be crossed and solutions spread, causing an intensification of NC.
“spatial heterogeneity enforces isolation and, therefore, diversity within a population, while adaptability ensures that environmental barriers can be crossed and solutions spread, causing an intensification of NC (Cantor and Whitehead, 2013;Derex and Boyd, 2016;Nisioti et al., 2022).”
From Dynamics of niche construction in adaptable populations evolving in diverse environments (2023) · cites this paper as Derex and Boyd, 2016
The Discussion (page not provided) reports that initial isolation helped subgroups develop diverse solutions and that later contact allowed them to combine those solutions into more complex ones. The paper studies social connectivity, however; these passages do not establish that spatial heterogeneity creates environmental barriers, that adaptability crosses them, or that the process intensifies NC. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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Appendix to Understanding Cumulative Cultural Evolution: A Reply to Vaesen, Collard, Et Al.Preprint
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- Authors
- Derex, M., & Boyd, R.
- Affiliations
- Arizona State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Derex, Maxime
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2016-02-29
- Volume
- 113
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 2982-2987
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC4801235
- OpenAlex
- W2288242710
- Cited by
- 289
- References
- 37
- Citations by year
- 2026: 23 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 32 · 2023: 37 · 2022: 34 · 2021: 43 · 2020: 24 · 2019: 30 · 2018: 23 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 8
- FWCI
- 257.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- John Templeton Foundation (48952)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Keywords
- cultural accumulation, cultural complexity, population fragmentation, cultural diversity, diffusion of innovations, fitness landscape, computer simulation, cultural evolution, group size
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Communication, Creativity, Cultural Evolution, Culture, Diffusion of Innovation, Female, Games, Experimental, Group Processes, Humans, Individuality, Interpersonal Relations, Male, Models, Theoretical, Population Density, Problem Solving, Random Allocation, Social Support, Technology Transfer, Video Games, Therapies, Investigational, Population Groups, Young Adult, Inventions
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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