The Pleasures and Perils of Darwinizing Culture (with phylogenies)
I (and colleagues) have just finished writing the following paper that lays out our plans to Darwinize culture. In short, we argue that the best way to study how culture evolves is NOT to waffle on about memes, but to leave that aside for the time being. Instead, we can use phylogenetic methods to actually get stuck in and test hypotheses about cultural evolution. Along the way we review some of the new and cool work being done on language evolution, and lay out a conceptual framework for understanding evolution.
Our abstract says:
Current debates about “Darwinizing culture” have typically focused on the validity of memetics. In this paper we argue that meme-like inheritance is not a necessary requirement for descent with modification. We suggest that an alternative and more productive way of Darwinizing culture can be found in the application of phylogenetic methods.
We review recent work on cultural phylogenetics and outline six fundamental questions that can be answered using the power and precision of quantitative phylogenetic methods. However, cultural evolution, like biological evolution, is often far from tree-like. We discuss the problems reticulate evolution can cause for phylogenetic analyses and suggest ways in which these problems can be overcome.
Our solutions involve a combination of new methods for the study of cultural evolution (network construction, reconciliation analysis, and Bayesian mixture models), and the triangulation of different lines of historical evidence. Throughout we emphasize that most debates about cultural phylogenies can only be settled by empirical research rather than armchair speculation.
You can get the paper at my website, or our lab website. Comments would be most appreciated!
Posted on 
December 13th, 2007 by 
Simon Greenhill
3 Responses to “The Pleasures and Perils of Darwinizing Culture (with phylogenies)”
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Email Henry Updates to Me
December 13th, 2007 at 6:28 am
“Throughout we emphasize that most debates about cultural phylogenies can only be settled by empirical research rather than armchair speculation.”
Indeed!
Anyways, just downloaded the pre-print from Simon’s site. Seems to be a very interesting read. Phylogenetic methods in evolutionary biology are definitely very powerful tools, when used on well-understood systems such as biological sequences but when applied to data sets with many confounding properties such as languages, then it is doomed to break down sooner or later. Maybe approaching the problem from the horizontal gene transfer perspective would be the best approach?
December 13th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Being home a week from Auckland for it is sad your work wasn’t included there as I would have very much liked the opportunity to discuss it in some depth.
Last night, talking to a colleague in the light of that conference, I expounded a bit more on my current hope that by eventually getting biology/nature into the early school curriculum we might prepare a new generation for systemic understanding of our more elusive cultural dynamics.
December 15th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
mogLi: Thanks for the comment! One of the points we make in the paper is that cultural phylogenies are no worse off than biological phylogenies. They’re both complex systems, with lots of reticulation happening, and this does NOT automatically invalidate phylogenetics. Indeed, new methods like Bayesian phylogenetics/mixture models and network techniques are very robust to horizontal transfer.
Tony: Thank you as well for the comment! I hadn’t heard about that conference which is a shame as it sounded really interesting. That’s a good point - when I talk to people about this stuff they always get really interested, and I find it a good way of explaining evolution to people. For some reason they seem to find it a bit less daunting than biological evolution.
More importantly, it’s a good and fun way of thinking about the broad sweep of culture and history.
–Simon