United Kingdom

CES Transformation Fund Capstone Conference 2024

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Welcome to the Capstone Conference of the [CES Transformation Fund](https://ces-transformationfund.org/) which was a hybrid conference held at Durham University (UK). The conference celebrated the achievements of 22 awardees of the grant scheme. Together they are helping to build a richer and more diverse cultural evolution field, whilst catalysing the application of cultural evolution research to global human futures.

Over the 2 days, each funded [Research Project, Applied Working Group, and Seedcorn Project](https://ces-transformationfund.org/our-projects/) presented their research. A professional live scribe from [Nifty Fox Creative](https://www.niftyfoxcreative.com/) created and showcased public communication illustrations for each presentation. On Thursday afternoon, there was a workshop on generating societal impact from research, and in the evening there was a ‘show and tell’ session with drinks reception (plus a dinner for awardees and invited others), while Friday wrapped up with a discussion of future directions for the cultural evolution field.
 

Organised by the CES Transformation Fund [Team](https://ces-transformationfund.org/people/):

* Rachel Kendal (Project Leader and PI)
* Lorna Winship (Grant Manager)
* Sarah Wright (Assistant Manager)
* Dr. Eva Reindl (Postdoctoral Researcher)

The grant scheme and capstone conference is generously funded by the [John Templeton Foundation](https://www.templeton.org/).


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To access the site please register [**here**](https://ces2024.webspace.durham.ac.uk/registration-information/). 

The Capstone Conference of the CES Transformation Fund celebrates the achievements of 22 awardees of the grant scheme. Together they are helping to build a richer and more diverse cultural evolution field, whilst catalysing the application of cultural evolution research to global human futures.

In medieval Europe, Gregorian chant was everywhere. Its unaccompanied melodies were sung daily in huge cathedrals, parish churches, remote monasteries; it was an omnipresent musical expression of medieval religious life. It was also “globalized” across Europe, after Charlemagne demanded standardization of worship in his new empire after 800 AD. As a sacred tradition, it was strictly conserved. Yet, the melodies that came down to us from medieval manuscripts are rarely exact copies. Throughout the centuries, chant was surreptitiously changing, and by the mid-16th century, the Church decided that Gregorian chant should be strictly standardized — again.

Our project experiments with applying phylogenetic methods from bioinformatics in order to characterize this process of diversification. We aim to determine whether the variability seen in Gregorian melodies is systematic, or result merely of transmission noise (with memorization and manuscript copying both susceptible to mistakes). We show that the bioinformatics approach is indeed applicable, directly on the raw melodies. On our pilot Christmas data, the inferred phylogeny conforms very closely to musicological expectation, it shows that Gregorian melodic dialects indeed do exist, and in an example of what computational scholarship can bring to the humanities, led to re-evaluating existing knowledge about one of the sources.

Live - Genome of Melody: Studying the evolution of Gregorian chant with bioinformatics

A distinguishing feature of humans is our ability to intentionally create rules that support social order, and modify existing rules when social or ecological conditions change. Cultural evolution leads to much more rapid change in the social and ecological environment that humans occupy compared to genetic evolution, suggesting that the need to change and adapt norms would have been a constant pressure on human societies. The main theory in the cultural evolution framework for how group-beneficial change in norms can happen is cultural group selection, whereby competition between groups that have different norms and institutions leads preferentially to the spread of norms and institutions that increase the success of the cultural group. But cultural group selection cannot explain rapid changes in norms within groups, as it can operate only on existing variation among groups. We posit that over millennia cultural group selection acted not just on norms, but crucially also on normative infrastructure – the meta-norms that structure a group’s processes for classifying and enforcing norms, favoring infrastructures with combinations of stability and innovativity that aid the success of the cultural group. By regulating the process by which violations are reasoned about, ambiguities are resolved, situations lacking precedence are evaluated, and enforcement behaviors are calibrated, normative infrastructure can shape how existing norms are interpreted and re-imagined, and how new norms get created to deal with novel circumstances. We conducted vignette experiments, surveys, and semi-structured interviews to elicit the normative infrastructure of the Turkana, a pastoral society in Kenya in which social order is maintained informally. Here we present results from the vignette studies showing how Turkana normative infrastructure resembles or differs from legal order, a broad class of solutions that permit rapid innovation without loss in stability.

Recording -  Normative infrastructure as a platform for reinventing social institutions

Everyone seems to have an opinion about how teens today fundamentally differ from previous generations as a result of digital media expansion and other forces of modern globalization. Few research studies, however, have investigated this empirically by simultaneously tracking developmental and cultural change over time. This presentation will summarize early findings from field research in northern Thailand tracking stability and change in adolescent moral values over 11 years. In 2012, in-depth interviews were conducted and surveys were administered with 40 Millennial adolescents (Mage = 17.30), evenly divided across rural and urban settings. In 2023, the same data collection techniques were employed with 60 Gen Z adolescents (Mage = 17.47) in the same settings. Analysis of variance of moral values reported on the Ethical Values Assessment (McKenzie & Jensen, 2024; Padilla-Walker & Jensen, 2016) reveal significant change over time among rural and urban Thai adolescents, though the direction of change is at times surprising. Results will be contextualized alongside shifts in digital media availability and adolescent media use over the same 11 years. The discussion will consider what results suggest about how culturally-salient moral values do—and do not—change in the face of rapid technological and cultural change.

Live - Globalized Adolescence: Tracking the Developmental Implications of Modern Globalization in Northern Thailand

In many parts of the world, Indigenous people have to confront new ways of living because of the activities of people from the so-called ‘western world’. Extractive industries and non-governmental organizations are major players in this picture. While these outsiders can cause major disruptions to the local economies and cultures, they also bring new ideas and ways of making a living. Unsurprisingly, there is diversity in who is drawn to the new opportunities, who has the greatest chance of benefiting from them, and who suffers from new inequalities that can emerge.
Our study aims to understand what propels certain people to engage in new cultural practices driven by what is often called ‘globalization’, and how such engagement impacts their health and well-being. Cultural Evolutionary Theory predicts that people are likely to adopt new cultural practices based on individual differences like age, and features of human psychology like a tendency to follow the crowd. Focusing on one village in a remote region of the Republic of the Congo, we ask: What else contributes to people’s decision to embrace the products and practices of globalization? What is the impact of their own cultural preferences and knowledge? Does their perspective on the environment matter? And, for those who adopt new practices, do these improve or harm their health and well-being?

Live - Globalization, Culture and Well-being in Congo

Live - Hunter Gatherer Education Working Group

Live - Sustainability Working Group

Enquist et al. (2023) suggested that human cumulative cultural evolution was enabled by enhanced abilities to process and remember sequential information, leading to cultural and cognitive achievements unprecedented in other animals. This hypothesis mainly rests on results of sequence discrimination learning tasks, showing that unlike for humans, learning to discriminate between sequences is difficult for non-human animals, requiring them hundreds, often thousands of trials. It is unclear whether animals’ difficulty in these tasks reflect difficulties with remembering sequences per se or is mainly due to the arbitrary ordering of the sequence items, thus underestimating their sequencing abilities. To disentangle these effects, we investigate sequence discrimination learning with a physical task in which we contrast an “arbitrary” condition with one in which we use causal relations between stimuli to indicate which sequence yields a reward, aiming to facilitate encoding of sequential information. We present results from zoo-housed primates (23 squirrel and 24 capuchin monkeys, 13 chimpanzees), 77 human adults and 239 children (3-11 years) in an “AB vs BA, BB, AA” task, providing the first sequence discrimination study with chimpanzees and children, demonstrating that a lack of meaningful relations between sequence stimuli impedes learning in humans and potentially also great apes.

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Live - Genome of Melody: Studying the evolution of Gregorian chant with bioinformatics

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Next from CES Transformation Fund Capstone Conference 2024

Live - Genome of Melody: Studying the evolution of Gregorian chant with bioinformatics

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads