Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena

Transmission Versus Truth, Imitation Versus Innovation: What Children Can Do That Large Language and Language-and-Vision Models Cannot (Yet)

Much discussion about large language models and language-and-vision models has focused on whether these models are intelligent agents. We present an alternative perspective. First, we argue that these artificial intelligence (AI) models are cultural technologies that enhance cultural transmission and are efficient and powerful imitation engines. Second, we explore what AI models can tell us about imitation and innovation by testing whether they can be used to discover new tools and novel causal structures and contrasting their responses with those of human children. Our work serves as a first step in determining which particular representations and competences, as well as which kinds of knowledge or skill, can be derived from particular learning techniques and data. In particular, we explore which kinds of cognitive capacities can be enabled by statistical analysis of large-scale linguistic data. Critically, our findings suggest that machines may need more than large-scale language and image data to allow the kinds of innovation that a small child can produce.

On the multiscale dynamics of punctuated evolution

For five decades, paleontologists, paleobiologists, and ecologists have investigated patterns of punctuated equilibria in biology. Here, we step outside those fields and summarize recent advances in the theory of and evidence for punctuated equilibria, gathered from contemporary observations in geology, molecular biology, genetics, anthropology, and sociotechnology. Taken in the aggregate, these observations lead to a more general theory that we refer to as punctuated evolution. The quality of recent datasets is beginning to illustrate the mechanics of punctuated evolution in a way that can be modeled across a vast range of phenomena, from mass extinctions hundreds of millions of years ago to the possible future ahead in the Anthropocene. We expect the study of punctuated evolution to be applicable beyond biological scenarios.

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.

Cumulative route improvements spontaneously emerge in artificial navigators even in the absence of sophisticated communication or thought

Homing pigeons (Columba livia) navigate by solar and magnetic compass, and fly home in idiosyncratic but stable routes when repeatedly released from the same location. However, when experienced pigeons fly alongside naive counterparts, their path is altered. Over several generations of turnover (pairs in which the most experienced individual is replaced with a naive one), pigeons show cumulative improvements in efficiency. Here, I show that such cumulative route improvements can occur in a much simpler system by using agent-based simulation. Artificial agents are in silico entities that navigate with a minimal cognitive architecture of goal-direction (they know roughly where the goal is), social proximity (they seek proximity to others and align headings), route memory (they recall landmarks with increasing precision), and continuity (they avoid erratic turns). Agents' behaviour qualitatively matched that of pigeons, and quantitatively fitted to pigeon data. My results indicate that naive agents benefitted from being paired with experienced agents by following their previously established route. Importantly, experienced agents also benefitted from being paired with naive agents due to regression to the goal: naive agents were more likely to err towards the goal from the perspective of experienced agents' memorised paths. This subtly biased pairs in the goal direction, resulting in intergenerational improvements of route efficiency. No cumulative improvements were evident in control studies in which agents' goal-direction, social proximity, or memory were lesioned. These 3 factors are thus necessary and sufficient for cumulative route improvements to emerge, even in the absence of sophisticated communication or thought.

Emergence of innovations in networked populations with reputation-driven interactions

In this work, we analyze how reputation-based interactions influence the emergence of innovations. To do so, we make use of a dynamic model that mimics the discovery process by which, at each time step, a pair of individuals meet and merge their knowledge to eventually result in a novel technology of higher value. The way in which these pairs are brought together is found to be crucial for achieving the highest technological level. Our results show that when the influence of reputation is weak or moderate, it induces an acceleration of the discovery process with respect to the neutral case (purely random coupling). However, an excess of reputation is clearly detrimental, because it leads to an excessive concentration of knowledge in a small set of people, which prevents a diversification of the technologies discovered and, in addition, leads to societies in which a majority of individuals lack technical capabilities.

Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution

It has been argued that teaching promotes the accurate transmission of cultural traits and eventually leads to cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). However, previous studies have questioned this argument. In this study, we modified the action sequences model into a network exploring model with reinforcement learning to examine the conditions under which teaching promotes CCE. Our model incorporates a time trade-off between innovation and teaching. Simulations revealed that the positive influence of teaching on CCE depends on task difficulty. When the task was too difficult and advanced, such that it could not be accomplished through individual learning within a limited time, spending more time on teaching-even at the expense of time for innovation-contributed to CCE. On the contrary, the easier the task, the more time was spent on innovation than on teaching, which contributed to the improvement of performance. These findings suggest that teaching becomes more valuable as cultures become more complex. Therefore, humanity must have co-evolved a complex cumulative culture and teaching that supports cultural fidelity.

The different paths to cultural convergence

Morin envisions the adaptive landscape of graphic codes as an unfertile valley where writing rises as an isolated peak that humans managed to reach only on four occasions throughout all of history. By exploring the different paths to cultural convergence, we suggest an alternative landscape occupied by a mountain range of visual art systems. We conclude that graphic communication through visual art worked well enough to render writing contingent but not necessary in most cases.

Cultural evolution in the science of culture and cultural evolution

My critical review [1] elicited a welcome diversity of perspectives across the 12 commentaries now published [2-13]. In total 28 co-authors were inspired to contribute. In addition to engaging with the critical perspectives of my review, several of the commentaries take the debates and discussions into insightful and potentially important supplementary domains that I highlight in what follows. I have extracted a number of major themes in which I detected overlaps in the foci of different commentaries, and I use these to organise my replies. I hope that our shared efforts will constitute some degree of 'cultural evolution' in our science, as suggested in the title of this reply to commentaries.

What made us "hunter-gatherers of words"

This paper makes three interconnected claims: (i) the "human condition" cannot be captured by evolutionary narratives that reduce it to a recent 'cognitive modernity', nor by narratives that eliminates all cognitive differences between us and out closest extinct relatives, (ii) signals from paleogenomics, especially coming from deserts of introgression but also from signatures of positive selection, point to the importance of mutations that impact neurodevelopment, plausibly leading to temperamental differences, which may impact cultural evolutionary trajectories in specific ways, and (iii) these trajectories are expected to affect the language phenotypes, modifying what is being learned and how it is put to use. In particular, I hypothesize that these different trajectories influence the development of symbolic systems, the flexible ways in which symbols combine, and the size and configurations of the communities in which these systems are put to use.

Bringing cumulative technological culture beyond copying versus reasoning

The dominant view of cumulative technological culture suggests that high-fidelity transmission rests upon a high-fidelity copying ability, which allows individuals to reproduce the tool-use actions performed by others without needing to understand them (i.e., without causal reasoning). The opposition between copying versus reasoning is well accepted but with little supporting evidence. In this article, we investigate this distinction by examining the cognitive science literature on tool use. Evidence indicates that the ability to reproduce others' tool-use actions requires causal understanding, which questions the copying versus reasoning distinction and the cognitive reality of the so-called copying ability. We conclude that new insights might be gained by considering causal understanding as a key driver of cumulative technological culture.

Cognitive flexibility supports the development of cumulative cultural learning in children

The scale of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is a defining characteristic of humans. Despite marked scientific interest in CCE, the cognitive underpinnings supporting its development remain understudied. We examined the role cognitive flexibility plays in CCE by studying U.S. children's (N = 167, 3-5-year-olds) propensity to relinquish an inefficient solution to a problem in favor of a more efficient alternative, and whether they would resist reverting to earlier versions. In contrast to previous work with chimpanzees, most children who first learned to solve a puzzlebox in an inefficient way switched to an observed, more efficient alternative. However, over multiple task interactions, 85% of children who switched reverted to the inefficient method. Moreover, almost all children in a control condition (who first learned the efficient method) switched to the inefficient method. Thus, children were keen to explore an alternative solution but, like chimpanzees, are overall conservative in reverting to their first-learned one.

Experiments in artificial culture: from noisy imitation to storytelling robots

This paper presents a series of experiments in collective social robotics, spanning more than 10 years, with the long-term aim of building embodied models of (aspects of) cultural evolution. Initial experiments demonstrated the emergence of behavioural traditions in a group of social robots programmed to imitate each other's behaviours (we call these Copybots). These experiments show that the noisy (i.e. less than perfect fidelity) imitation that comes for free with real physical robots gives rise naturally to variation in social learning. More recent experimental work extends the robots' cognitive capabilities with simulation-based internal models, equipping them with a simple artificial theory of mind. With this extended capability we explore, in our current work, social learning not via imitation but robot-robot storytelling, in an effort to model this very human mode of cultural transmission. In this paper, we give an account of the methods and inspiration for these experiments, the experiments and their results, and an outline of possible directions for this programme of research. It is our hope that this paper stimulates not only discussion but suggestions for hypotheses to test with the Storybots. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.

Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees

Social learning in non-human primates has been studied experimentally for over 120 years, yet until the present century this was limited to what one individual learns from a single other. Evidence of group-wide traditions in the wild then highlighted the collective context for social learning, and broader 'diffusion experiments' have since demonstrated transmission at the community level. In the present article, we describe and set in comparative perspective three strands of our recent research that further explore the collective dimensions of culture and cumulative culture in chimpanzees. First, exposing small communities of chimpanzees to contexts incorporating increasingly challenging, but more rewarding tool use opportunities revealed solutions arising through the combination of different individuals' discoveries, spreading to become shared innovations. The second series of experiments yielded evidence of conformist changes from habitual techniques to alternatives displayed by a unanimous majority of others but implicating a form of quorum decision-making. Third, we found that between-group differences in social tolerance were associated with differential success in developing more complex tool use to exploit an increasingly inaccessible resource. We discuss the implications of this array of findings in the wider context of related studies of humans, other primates and non-primate species. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.