Culture

Abstract

If you are not sure what 'culture' means, you are not alone. In 1952, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn identified 164 definitions of culture and there has been growth rather than rationalisation in the ensuing 70 years. In everyday English, culture is the knowledge and behaviour that characterises a particular group of people. Under this umbrella definition, culture was for many decades the exclusive province of the humanities and social sciences, where anthropologists, historians, linguists, sociologists and other scholars studied and compared the language, arts, cuisine, and social habits of particular human groups. Of course, that important work continues, but since the 1980s culture has also been a major focus of enquiry in the natural sciences.

Figure 1

Logical geography of research on cultural evolution. (A) Definitions. The three commonly-used definitions of culture are nested; Culture¹ is more inclusive than Culture², and Culture² is more inclusive than Culture³. (B) Projects. The three definitions of culture are linked with different explanatory projects. The anthropocentric project, which seeks to understand what makes human lives distinctive, overlaps with the project examining interactions between social learning and evolution. The search for cultural selection (also known as the ‘third-way project’) is part of the effort to understand relations between social learning and evolution, and is sometimes (but not always) part of the anthropocentric project. (C) Fields. People who study ‘cultural evolution’ come from many fields of science (the list here, from behavioural ecology to zoology, is not exhaustive). Each study of cultural evolution relates to one or more of the three explanatory projects. The anthropocentric project is also a focus of evolutionary psychology. Cultural evolutionary research is like evolutionary psychology to the extent that it explains distinctively human behaviour with reference to complex, genetically inherited cognitive processes. Panels A, B and C represent conceptual relations, not volumes of research. For example, cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology are represented by ovals of equal size, but this does not indicate the two fields are yielding similar volumes of research. Similarly, the degree of overlap between the two fields is not an estimate of how many studies of cultural evolution share assumptions with evolutionary psychology.

Figure 2

Culture³ in pigeons. Upper panel: In each chain of the experimental group, a single pigeon (red) was first released from the same site 12 times, then partnered with a naïve bird (orange) and flown as a pair a further 12 times. The first bird was then replaced by a third bird (yellow) and this new pair (orange-yellow) was released 12 times. This procedure was repeated until the fifth-generation naïve bird (purple) was added and flown a final 12 times. In the control groups, single pigeons (Solo) and fixed pairs (Pair) were released the same number of times as the experimental group (60 flights). Lower panel: Linear mixed-effects model fitted to the final flights of each generation for all three treatment groups. Over generations, route efficiency continued to increase in the Experimental group but quickly plateaued in the Solo and Pair groups. (Data from Sasaki and Biro, 2017.)