From Cultural Practices to Organizations: A Constraints-Based View of Cultural Evolution

In this talk, I’ll provide an overview of how to understand cultural evolution through constraints. I’ll first present a few case studies to illustrate how constraints lead cultural products to take specific forms. Then, using a model drawing on intuitions from ethnographies of craft, techniques, and sports, I’ll suggest that taking the constrained aspect of culture seriously can predict a specific distribution of learners’ outcomes and a punctuated evolutionary path, and that, importantly, the amount of information needed to be transmitted from a teacher to a learner to attain high-fidelity transmission is low. Finally, I’ll present some of my ongoing work on how specific features of the contemporary world (complex social and technological systems) can also benefit from a constraints-based cultural evolutionary approach.