How is culture transmitted from one generation to another a. through communication

2.3.1 Niche Construction Theory

The social and cultural transmission of attributes from one generation to the next looks like evolution, which it may reasonably be considered to be, but it is not synonymous with Darwinian evolution. Much current theorizing about evolution concerns the role of processes responsible for social and cultural evolution and such processes can often be distinguished from those that define standard evolution theory. One such proposed process is niche construction, whereby the habits of species are seen to bring about changes in habitat and consequential changes in selection pressures that influence the future evolutionary course of that species.

The term natural selection was coined by Darwin [1859] to differentiate the processes he wished to delineate from artificial selection [selective breeding] in which humans intervene to manipulate the breeding process of animals with the intention of selecting human-preferred traits in those animals. Natural selection, which is nonteleological [i.e., not governed by an ultimate purpose], describes the process whereby natural variations in phenotype [observable traits] are likely to lead to some traits being better adapted adventitiously to particular features of the environment [ecological niche]. Those adaptive traits confer a reproductive advantage for the individuals possessing that phenotype. Greater reproductive success is likely to lead, in turn, to a gradual increase in the population frequency of the genotype [genetic complement] associated with the successful phenotype. Over time, numerous successive adaptations may lead to the emergence of new species.

Niche construction, on the other hand, occurs when the organism’s own behavior results in persistent change to the environment. Such ecosystem engineering bequeaths an ecological inheritance to subsequent generations, whereby the altered selection pressures of the inherited ecology may be capable of producing evolutionary change [see Box 2.1]. In this way, reciprocal feedback between the habits of organisms and the habitats they occupy is seen as an intrinsic feature of niche construction. Both standard evolution theory and niche construction theory identify environmental selection pressure as the key mechanism of adaption, but the difference between the two is in relation to the role posited for the environment. In standard evolution theory, the environment may be seen as exogenous in that it is a preexisting state to which the organism adapts and evolution ensues as a consequence of selection pressures imposed by the environment. By contrast, in niche construction theory, the environment may be seen as endogenous in that its modification by the organism is held to be an intrinsic part of the evolutionary chain.

Box 2.1

Evolutionary Niche Construction

Dam-building Beavers

Beaver dams consist of vertical poles, crisscrossed with horizontal branches, and a combination of weeds and mud painstakingly positioned to fill the gaps. The resulting artificial lake provides protection from predators, serves as a food store, and serves as a safe site for the nest [or “lodge”]. Dams have a major effect on the surrounding ecosystem, creating wetlands that provide habitat for a diverse wildlife.

It is reasonable to assume that the habit of dam building did not appear fully intact. Rather, it must have evolved over many generations during which feebler and more rudimentary practices by beaver ancestors entrapped small pools of water that benefited the survival of those ancestors. In time, the selection pressures arising from advantages created by those ancestral practices evolved into the complex and highly integrated behavior of dam building that is characteristic of modern beaver populations.

Thus, in addition to evolution due to natural selection of traits suited for survival in a given habitat, long-term habitat change caused by the behavior of a given species can similarly lead to selection of traits suited to the new habitat. In a loose sense, by changing its environment, “the beaver” can be seen to have affected the course of its own evolution, not to mention the evolution of other species that share its habitat. These include those that thrive on the resources provided by the lake, but also would-be predators in need of alternative foraging opportunities due to the protection afforded the beaver by its dam-building habits.

The idea that the habits of animals can influence habitat and thereby affect the selection pressures that underpin evolution may seem fairly self-evident. However, the possibility appears to have been less than obvious to some, including the American biologist George C. Williams, a major proponent of the gene-centered view of evolution popularized by British biologist Richard Dawkins [1976, 1982]. Williams [1992] wrote: “Adaptation is always asymmetrical; organisms adapt to their environments, never vice versa” [p. 484]. However, the idea that the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes is unidirectional [i.e., that genotype alone determines phenotype and not vice versa] appears certain to be wrong. The modern study of genetics, including epigenetics [discussed in later chapters], suggests that genotypes and phenotypes coevolve through processes of reciprocal influence.

It is obvious that humans are responsible for immense changes to the environment of the planet. Much of that change, if viewed as niche construction, has often amounted to environmental degradation, whereby deforestation, industrial development, and urban expansion have destroyed habitats for many species, including, at times, our own. Whether the totality of human niche construction proves ultimately to be to the benefit or detriment of our species [not to mention the planet] has yet to be gaged. Notwithstanding, human ecological inheritance is linked to human social and cultural proclivities, leading biologists and social scientists alike to suggest niche construction as a mechanism by which social and cultural habits [and not biology solely] have the potential to influence human evolution [e.g., Laland et al., 2014; Odling-Smee et al., 2013].

A frequently cited example of cultural adaptation is the evolution of adult lactose absorption in populations that adopted dairy farming following the Agricultural Revolution. Culturally determined farming of cattle for milk is believed to have created selection pressures in pastoralist populations favoring the gene variant [allele] that enables lactose consumed in milk to be absorbed from the intestine [McCracken, 1971; Simoons, 1970]. Examples such as this have led some theorists to conclude that gene-culture coevolution is a general feature of human evolution, and possibly even the dominant form [Laland et al., 2014]. There is even the suggestion that human niche construction could be “used” to speed up or impede human biological evolution by way of niche engineering for that purpose. Thus, although traditional evolutionary theory eschews a teleological dimension, it is difficult for niche construction theory to do likewise. Just as selective breeding practice with farm animals and pets demonstrates the fact of purposeful manipulation of evolution, niche construction theory draws attention to such possibilities arising from human culture. Nevertheless, rather than a radical departure from traditional evolution theory, as some proponents argue, the main contribution of niche construction theory may be in suggesting new emphases. Competition for limited resources within and between species underpins natural selection. Accordingly, the idea that the evolutionary paths of species can be affected by the ecological impact of competitors is inherent in natural selection. Thus, it seems a minimal rather than radical reconceptualization to emphasize that the ecological inheritance of organisms can affect the evolutionary path of their own [niche construction theory] as well as the evolutionary paths of competitor species [traditional evolution theory].

Admittedly, in the context of human evolution, niche construction acquires particular significance because of the emergence of human culture as an adaption to habitat challenges. For example, farming is a cultural adaption to deal with the problem of food supply. As outlined above, the adoption of cattle farming presaged genetic evolution in the form of lactose absorption in human populations. Humans have an unparalleled capacity for cultural adaption. So much so, that it has been suggested that cultural adaptation has the potential to replace genetic adaptation [Laland and Brown, 2006]. Despite the genome of our hunter-gatherer ancestors being little changed, cultural adaption, including engineering and technology, has allowed humans to thrive in every kind of habitat from the equator to the arctic. Thus, compared with the more biocentric perspective of standard evolution theory, niche construction theory draws attention to alternative routes of evolutionary adaptation involving interaction between species habits and habitats with particular emphasis on the reputed adaptive potential of cultural inheritance.

1 Past Views on Culture

Anthropology has borrowed from psychology regarding cultural transmission. Thus culture has been defined as a “mass” of learned and transmitted motor reactions, habits, techniques, ideas, and values—and the behavior they induce” [Kroeber, 1948, p. 8]. The holistic focus on phenomena is likewise not lost in anthropology—culture has been defined as an integrated whole in which systemic interconnections between physiological drives and their transformations through social institutions were the core of the concept [Malinowski, 1944]. Within that perspective,

culture is an integral composed of partly autonomous, pardy coordinated institutions.It is integrated on a series of principles such as the community of blood through procreation; the contiguity in space related to cooperation; the specialization in activities; and last but not least, the use of power in political organization. Each culture owes its completeness and self-sufficiency to the fact that it satisfies the whole range of basic, instrumental and integrative needs. [Malinowski, 1944, p. 40]

1 Definition

The meme is a hypothetical unit of cultural transmission, sometimes restricted specifically to forms of culture which are transmitted by imitation. Memes are replicators in that they are copied [with imperfect heredity] when one individual imitates another. Given that memes have some properties [their outward effects on human behavior] which affect the rate at which they replicate, their copy fidelity, and their longevity, they are thus subject to natural selection and are expected to accumulate adaptations.

The key aspect of the meme hypothesis is that the adaptations generated after many generations of meme transmission [cultural evolution] are not necessarily expected to increase the reproductive success of the persons that carry the memes [as traditional sociobiological theory explains cultural traits], nor are they expected to aid any higher levels of organization such as familial groups [as functionalist strains of sociology and anthropology often explain the existence of cultural characteristics]. Memes are expected to garner adaptations which aid the memes themselves as they spread through human social networks. In this way, memes are described as being selfish replicators.

Memes are sometimes referred to as ‘cultural viruses,’ in reference to their putatively maladaptive [or at least nonadaptive] nature. In this case, humans are referred to as hosts to parasitic memes. Host behavior [and in some cases, host phenotype in general] is not always under the control of the genotypes which built the host. In some cases, the host may be considered an extended phenotype, which acts in the interest of parasite genes. Thus the aggressive nature of rabid mammals is understood as a manipulation by the rabies parasite, which is spread by the saliva into bite wounds caused by the rabid animal. Memes are proposed to affect their spread in a similar manner, through the manipulation of a human host's behavior. From this perspective, much human behavior is the result of insidious cultural parasites which manipulate the instincts and motivations of human hosts in order to ‘trick’ host bodies into performing maladaptive behaviors which increase the reproductive success of the cultural traits [memes] themselves.

3 Teaching

In humans, teaching is crucial for cultural transmission, and is common across all cultures, despite differences in its form and frequency [Csibra and Gergely, 2011; Hewlett et al., 2016; Kline, 2015]. In its most complex forms, human teaching is a form of referential communication implying multi- and meta-perspective taking, in which learners expect the transmission of generic information, while teachers gradually scaffold them through recursive social references [e.g., adjusting their communication to the gradually changing needs of learners], until shared objectives are met [e.g., Strauss et al., 2014]. Children are uniquely adapted to understand pedagogical settings [i.e., in which experts inform naïve learners], use ostensive communication and engage in joint triadic activities [e.g., Call, 2009; Tomasello, 2019]. Young children preferentially engage in early triadic exchange with adults [Tomasello, 2019], and imitate more effectively in pedagogical contexts [Carpenter et al., 2005]. Unsurprisingly, these kinds of “pedagogical interactions” are crucial throughout development [e.g., for language acquisition], well beyond formal education [Tomasello, 2019]. As for [over]imitation, teaching in humans is a double-edged sword: while it enormously increases the effectiveness of social transmission, it may hinder individual exploration and innovation. Bonawitz et al. [2011], for instance, found that children explore and play with objects significantly less, after being instructed about some of their functions.

Nonhuman taxa do not engage in human-like referential communicative interactions, and teaching has long been considered a uniquely human feature [Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Csibra and Gergely, 2011; Galef, 1992; Laland, 2017; Strauss and Ziv, 2012; Tomasello, 1994]. However, although human teaching can be extremely complex, it may also occur in the absence of intentionality, mental state attribution, perspective convergence and the like. Humans universally engage in intuitive behaviors that, from the perspective of natural pedagogy [Strauss and Ziv, 2012], fulfill the functions of teaching. For example, adults spontaneously adjust their behavior to facilitate children's information processing, through infant-directed speech and the adjustment of speech complexity [e.g., Kalashnikova et al., 2017; Roy, 2009]. In other areas of the world, these more intuitive forms of learning support may be more common than direct active teaching. To date, direct comparisons across cultures are rare [Boyette and Hewlett, 2017; Hewlett et al., 2011], but ethnological studies suggest that learners in non-Western cultures largely acquire novel knowledge and skills through simple social learning [e.g., observation, imitation and participation in adult activities; Gaskins and Paradise, 2010; Lancy, 2014], or through indirect forms of teaching [e.g., learning takes place within a task to complete, and learners are mainly responsible for improving their knowledge and skills; Gaskins and Paradise, 2010; Lancy, 2016; MacDonald, 2007; Rogoff et al., 2003]. In hunter-gatherers, for instance, teaching episodes are often brief, subtle, indirect, with little generalizability of the knowledge acquired [Boyette and Hewlett, 2017], and children usually learn from peers in the context of play, with very few instances of direct active teaching by adults [Boyette, 2016; Terashima and Hewlett, 2016]. This strikingly contrasts with teaching in Western cultures, where teaching is often characterized by explicit and abstract verbal instructions [Gaskins and Paradise, 2010; Hewlett et al., 2011], which may allow more effective transmission of knowledge in complex stratified societies with a high specialization of knowledge [Boyette and Hewlett, 2017; Lancy, 2010, 2016].

To better capture the variety of human teaching forms, researchers have advocated a functionalist approach, which also allows comparisons to nonhuman taxa, independently of the proximate mechanisms involved in teaching [Hoppitt et al., 2008; Kline, 2015]. A functionalist perspective defines teaching as a cooperative behavior [Thornton and Raihani, 2008] entailing the modification of teachers' behavior in the presence of naïve learners, to facilitate learning by others and with no immediate direct benefits for teachers [Caro and Hauser, 1992]. In line with this definition, teaching in other taxa differs from human teaching for three main reasons. Firstly, animal teaching is not a referential communicative act, but rather a form of cooperation, in which teachers and learners mutually adapt their behavior. Therefore, complex cognitive skills are not necessary, as cooperative acts are widespread across taxa also in the absence of complex cognition [e.g., Brahma et al., 2018; Clutton-Brock et al., 2001]. Secondly, animal teaching occurs between closely related individuals, and aims at increasing kin's knowledge or skills [thus also providing fitness benefits to teachers]. In contrast to humans, there is no evidence yet that animal teaching is also connected to the emergence of culture. Thirdly, in contrast to humans, there is no evidence yet that animal teaching serves social functions [i.e., sustaining identity formation and group cohesion].

In line with this definition, teaching is present in at least four species other than humans [Hoppitt et al., 2008; Kline, 2015; Thornton and Raihani, 2008]: meerkats [Suricata suricatta], who gradually teach offspring to consume potentially dangerous live prey [Thornton and McAuliffe, 2006]; tandem-running ants [Temnothorax albipenni], who teach novel food locations to naïve nest-mates, and adjust to their feedback [Franks and Richardson, 2006; Richardson et al., 2007]; pied babblers [Turdoides bicolor], who gradually teach nestlings to associate food to specific purr calls [Raihani and Ridley, 2008]; and bees [Apis mellifera], where knowledgeable workers inform naïve nest-mates about the location and quality of food [Riley et al., 2005; von Frisch, 1967]. This unusual distribution of teaching across taxa fails to reflect more general cognitive abilities, and suggests that teaching has independently evolved several times, with different degrees of cognitive complexity and proximate mechanisms [Hoppitt et al., 2008; Kline, 2015]. In nonhuman animals, teaching mainly takes place through feedback and coordination, with teachers effectively repeating behavioral patterns until learners acquire the knowledge or skills. For that, no recursive communication is required, so that human teaching appears to be a special case of [complex] teaching, rather than defining its essential functions.

By providing accurate cues and knowledge to learners, teaching enables more effective social transmission than simple social learning, and may thus be selected for, regardless of its proximate mechanisms, whenever other forms of social or asocial learning are not effective enough [Hoppitt et al., 2008; Kline, 2015]. Teaching, for instance, may more likely emerge when other forms of learning entail prohibitive risks [e.g., in solitary hunters, who would otherwise have little chance to acquire hunting skills, or if prey may be lethal, as in meerkats; Thornton and Raihani, 2008] or in communities with more advanced “technology” [e.g., rather in “high than low-tech” chimpanzee communities; Musgrave et al., 2020]. Moreover, teaching may more likely emerge in cooperative breeders, who can better share the costs of teaching among several helpers [Thornton and Raihani, 2008]. Indeed, all the species for which there is to date compelling evidence of teaching are cooperative breeders [including humans; Hrdy, 1999].

IX AFTERWORD

Having got this far, the question, as in all studies of cultural transmission, is: How did the phenomenon get started in the first place? At the present point in time we still do not have an answer to this intriguing mystery.

There have been many descriptive studies on the transmission of feeding behavior from generation to generation in other mammals. However, the methodology of our case study differs from others, since it is based on field observations combined with a complete parametric laboratory analysis. Together these two approaches have produced a seminal analysis of the mechanisms that permit this behavior to be perpetuated in the wild.

Many birds learn their songs from others, and geographic variation in their vocalizations results from inaccurate cultural transmission. This has been investigated most thoroughly in a songbird, the white-crowned sparrow, although comparisons between species reveal a great diversity in the patterns of variation. The two main subjects of interest to the field have been to explain how geographic variation arises and what its communicative relevance is to birds. Although a simple neutral model, in which variation arises by a combination of chance mistakes and a tendency to learn from nearby individuals, fits much field data, in other species it appears that birds pay attention to song sharing.

GCC via Gene–Culture Transmission

The intermediate mode of GCC stretches from the extreme of pure genetic transmission on one side to pure cultural transmission on the other. Gene action during neural and mental development plays a colorful role here. Unlike pure genetic transmission, gene action does not commit the developing mind and brain to one innately programmed specification of which cultural information will be accepted. And in stark contrast to pure cultural transmission, gene action does not flatten the individual's learning potential into a landscape of outcomes determined solely by culture. In gene–culture transmission, the activity of developmental genes establishes hills and valleys of learning preference. The hills mark outcomes partially blocked or less likely to occur; allied cultural information has little or no effect on learning and mental development and is less likely to be transmitted or utilized in an arbitrary manner. The valleys mark outcomes to which the mind's development is more likely to flow. Allied cultural information is strongly preferred and likely to be transmitted within and across generations of the evolving population, and used for specific goals in mental development. Thus, all cultures enjoy rich structures of myth and folklore within the creative uniqueness of each language community; grounding these language arts, however, are the deep universals of human linguistic cognition, a species universal that opens the door to mutual intelligibility and the swiftly meaningful translation of texts between cultures.

In gene–culture transmission, genes act to endow culture learning with directionality, not to program final behavior or mental state or leave the individual open to arbitrary cultural determination. The directionality essential to this form of learning can be operationalized only through choice, by selecting certain outcomes over others, and in humanlike species choice ultimately involves conscious reflective decision. Thus in marked contrast to pure genetic transmission and pure cultural transmission, Darwinian natural selection acting through gene–culture transmission is expected to select for individual minds which, in their creative actions of learning and deliberation, shape themselves. Their epigenetic rules endow them with basic competence for deliberative choice. Thinking to this extent for themselves, they are neither genetic robots nor culture slaves. We therefore begin to see why the hypotheses and proposals of human sociobiology have been found relevant beyond the natural and social sciences, especially in the debates of humanists, philosophers, lawmakers, and theologians.

These are principal conceptual alternatives in the mechanisms of cultural transmission during gene–culture coevolution. Although research is ongoing, provisional inferences may be made on the basis of the advances achieved by investigators in multiple fields across the biological, behavioral, and social sciences including sociobiology. Seen against the background of such advances, the paradigm of the tabula rasa or blank slate – ordaining pure cultural transmission – cuts a very poor figure. Consistently across the developmental events spotlighted by the primary epigenetic rules are signs of either pure genetic transmission, or of gene–culture transmission focused tightly on a narrow range of sensoriperceptual competences. In the development of higher order capacities for learning, choice, decision, and creativity the gene–culture transmission strategies prevail, in which a range of outcomes is notably favored over others. The mode I have here called pure cultural transmission of course remains essential to complete understanding [you may drive on the left while others adhere to the right]. However, no evidence supports the hypothesis that pure cultural transmission and the tabula rasa strategy of learning alone suffice to understand human evolution and its consequences for sociality, culture, and creativity.

The perpetuation of a family's position in the distribution of income from parents to children reflects the genetic and cultural transmission of individual traits, as well as the inheritance of group memberships and income-earning assets. This article shows that the extent of intergenerational economic status transmission is considerably greater than was thought to be the case a generation ago, the genetic inheritance of traits contributing to the cognitive skills measured on IQ and related tests explains very little of the intergenerational transmission of economic status, even if the heritability of IQ is quite high, and the combined genetic and cultural inheritance processes operating through superior wealth, cognitive levels, and educational attainments of those with well-off parents, while important, do not fully explain the intergenerational transmission of economic status. It also identifies some overlooked individual traits that enhance economic success which are transmitted across generations.

Introduction

Language is a culturally transmitted system – children learn the language of their speech community on the basis of the linguistic behavior of that community. This cultural transmission can lead to the cultural evolution of the linguistic system, whereby language changes over time as a consequence of pressures acting on it during its cultural transmission.

Cultural evolution potentially offers an explanation for the origins of a linguistic system with the design features and functionality of human language, as well as an explanation for the subsequent change of such systems – the processes that explain the ways in which languages change on a historical timescale can also explain how languages themselves emerged.

Furthermore, the fact that languages themselves can evolve has implications for linguistic theories more generally. One goal for linguistic theory is to achieve explanatory adequacy [Chomsky, 1965] – an explanation of how language is acquired on the basis of linguistic data. This goal for linguistic theory explicitly links features of language with components of an innate capacity for language. However, the evolutionary dynamics arising from cultural transmission mean that we cannot infer the characteristics of the language faculty directly from a single episode of language acquisition, but must consider how any innate language faculty will interact with cultural transmission to shape languages over cultural time.

I begin by explaining exactly what is meant when we say that language is culturally transmitted and that this cultural transmission leads to cultural evolution and then I discuss what kinds of linguistic phenomena can be explained in these terms. I then go on to consider three theories of the cultural evolution of language, each of which proposes rather different mechanisms for cultural evolution. Note that this is not an exhaustive list of all possible mechanisms – rather, these three theories offer a contrasting range of accounts for the evolution of linguistic structure. Finally, I consider the ways in which cultural evolution has significance for the wider linguistic community. Although such evolutionary processes have obvious implications for our understanding of language origins and language change, their impact potentially runs deeper, to goals that lie at the heart of classic synchronic linguistics.