Japan

Seeing nonhuman animals as cultural beings depends on perspectives and assumptions in theoretical frameworks and empirical methodologies. (Mis)recognizing animal culture comes down to what counts as teaching, imitation or cultural social transmission of information. My model of culture shifts the focus to social ontology.
Culture is a real social kind, meaning ‘culture’ can both do explanatory work and be explained in virtue of the causal and constitutive properties of social practices. Culture is dynamic meaning-making processes; ways of being wherein behaviours, objects, and places have salience/significance for social agents in virtue of their social practices (i.e., social meaning). Cultural phenomena are imbued with and carry information, knowledge and value that go beyond biological function and mere means to ends. I argue that some animals engage in meaning-making practices that are co-created, re-created (re)enacted, embedded, and transmitted in actions, interactions and relationships within social matrices; all of which constitutes culture.
At stake, is our epistemic access to animal culture and implications for conservation. How can we know there is social meaning? Heyes (2019) states we are a “long way from knowing how to integrate explanation and understanding, information and meaning, science and the humanities” (p.43). Inherent in her perspective are dichotomous relations of object(ive)/subject(ive). Consider information (objective) and meaning (subjective). Information is not a vacuous form awaiting content but rather meaning is always already immanent. Social information/meaning arises from intersubjectivity (even distally) and is always already objective/subjective. Epistemic access (explanation/understanding) requires science/humanities interaction to interrogate partial perspectives and situate objective knowledge.

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

Nonhuman Animal Culture: Meaning in Practice

### Conference Welcome

Welcome to the third Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2021. In the conference, which will be held from June 9-11, 2021, about 180 researchers from East Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Europe, North and South America give presentations on their latest research advancing the evolutionary understanding of human and nonhuman animal culture.

### Schedule and Program

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/1ef06ffd05f80957b4a5b685f63ee3ba.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fullprogram.pdf)
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/12285eb22580949635121d15d5b46325.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/abstracts.pdf)

**Program-at-glance**

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/c0d0d4c8fcdad49d12631574fd966ae8.png)

### About the conference 
 
**Help-desk:** 
Please first visit [Help-desk](https://underline.io/events/120/help-desk) where you can find the instructions and manuals for exploring the conference site. 

**Plenary sessions:**
Five leading researchers give a live talk. It is like a TV show. The audience can submit a question from the chat window. Chat messages are immediately delivered to speakers and moderators.

**Q&A sessions (parallel):**
Each presenter first gives a 2-minute live lightning talk followed by an 8-minute live discussion with the audience. It uses Zoom.

**Discussion sessions:** 
The audience can approach presenters and discuss their research. The sessions are held in a dedicated room in Gathertown.
 
**Gathertown:**
It is a platform dedicated to live virtual interactions.
Gather Town is available for all participants 24 hours during the conference.
You can meet and talk with anybody at a lounge or at a table in Gathertown.
Further Gather Town instruction and how to use short keys please find in our [Help desk page](https://underline.io/events/120/help-desk). 

**Videos and slides:**

* Plenary sessions and the Q&A sessions will be recorded and uploaded after the sessions.
* All the videos and slides are available for 60 days after the conference but only to registered ones. 

**Text-based chatting with the speakers:** 
You can chat with any speaker in the Q&A and discussion sessions. A chat window is available on each speaker’s page, and you can leave your questions there. 

**Announcement to the other participants:**
If you want to make an announcement to the other participants (e.g., “Hey, let’s meet at the lounge in Gathertown from 9pm CEST!), please use twitter (#CESConf2021).



### Code of conduct

See the full details of [the code of conduct](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/).
&nbsp; 
 CES is dedicated to providing a welcoming and harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality, or the presence of or care for dependents. 
We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.

&nbsp;
**Harassment can occur in-person or virtually, and includes, but is not limited to:**
* Comments (verbal, text, etc.) that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality
* Sexual images in public spaces (physical or virtual)
* Deliberate intimidation, stalking, or following
* Harassing photography or recording (including sharing of presentation materials without consent)
* Sustained disruption of talks or other events (including “Zoombombing”)
* Inappropriate physical contact or unwelcome sexual attention
* Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behaviour 

&nbsp;
 **Inclusiveness Committee**:
&nbsp;
 To facilitate implementing the code of conduct and foster a climate of inclusion, we have developed an inclusiveness committee. Below is their contact information:
 **Hiromi Matsumae**:	matsumae.hiromi.g@tokai.ac.jp
 **Patrick Savage**:	psavage@sfc.keio.ac.jp
 **Sarah Mathew**:	Sarah.Mathew@asu.edu
 **Gmail:** inclusivenessCES2021@gmail.com
 See [more details about reporting the harassment.](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/)

### Organizing committee

**Honorary Conference Organizer:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home) 

**Chair:** [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io)

**Scientific Committee:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home), [Yasuo Ihara (the University of Tokyo)](https://researchmap.jp/read0209180?lang=en), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Naoko Matsumoto (Okayama University)](https://researchmap.jp/nmatsumoto_okayama-u), [Masako Myowa (Kyoto University)](https://myowa.educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en), [Hisashi Nakao (Nanzan University)](https://www.hisashinakao.com/), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)

**Local Organizing Committee:** [Yutaka Horita (Teikyo University)](https://sites.google.com/site/yhoritapage/), [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io/), [Ayaka Takimoto (Hokkaido University)](https://lynx.let.hokudai.ac.jp/~takimoto/), [Kohei Tamura (Tohoku University)](https://researchmap.jp/7000017854)

**Inclusiveness Committee:** [Sarah Mathew (Arizona State University)](https://www.sarahmathew.net/), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)


![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/967110a00d200a6b20d6f4fa6556ba13.png)

For attending the conference, you first need to register and pay fees from [the link here](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/registration/). After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site. After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site

Registration fee

poster

Cultural attractor landscapes describe the time-evolution of cultural variants (i.e. behaviors, artifacts) over successive transmission events. When cultural variants sit at a local minimum of a stable attractor landscape, there will be no cumulative error over transmissions, allowing Darwinian selectionist dynamics to drive cumulative cultural evolution. But because cultural attractors are the emergent products of shifting populations (individuals can leave or die, and new individuals can be born or enter the population) of individuals with potentially-idiosyncratic and dynamic cognitive landscapes, which are in turn the emergent products of individual experience within a culture, stable cultural attractor landscapes cannot be taken for granted. Little is known about how cultural attractors form or stabilize in light of this culture-cognition feedback loop. We present a model of cultural attractor dynamics, which adapts a cognitive model of unsupervised learning of phoneme categories in individual learners to a multi-agent setting wherein individual learners are tasked with categorizing and generating signals for one another. Beginning from a state in which all agents possess a set of randomly distributed categories of uniform probability, under some conditions populations self-organize into signal clusters, which constitute an identifiable cultural attractor landscape. We explore the role of various innate cognitive biases, levels of transmission error, learning periods, lifespans, population sizes, and network structures to understand when population-level structure may emerge, what properties it is likely to have, and how stable it is. Our analyses can provide insights into the conditions that may be favorable or unfavorable for cumulative culture to emerge.

The Emergence of Cultural Attractors: How Dynamic Populations of Learners Achieve Collective Cognitive Alignment

Achieving sustainability is as much about knowing what defines sustainability as it is about doing the right thing. Without complete information about global stock levels, ecological tipping points, resource dynamics, societal metabolism, enforcement costs, etc., an enlightened citizen or social planner cannot define the strategy space that constitutes sustainable action. We break from traditional modelling approaches, which assume the conditions for sustainability are known. Using an agent-based model, we investigate the evolution knowledge about the sustainable courses of action in a common-pool resource dilemma. Our models show that the structure of the resource, that is, the set of parameter governing it, in conjunction with sufficient inter-group variation in cultural beliefs, is critical to the evolution of sustainability. Specifically, sustainability can evolve if the resource maximizes the difference between sustainable cooperative outcomes and non-cooperative unsustainable outcomes. Nevertheless, we find that this equilibrium is seldom found before an initial collapse.

Resource Characteristics and the Evolution of Sustainability

The patriarchal system is hegemonic in the contemporary world. In this study we aimed at understanding the causes of this prevalence, investigating the evolutionary origins of patriarchy. Our question was whether the masculine philopatry is related to the maintenance of the patriarchal structure. We conducted an integrative bibliographic review of the ethological literature, emphasizing the development of feminist concepts about patriarchy and the parental preferences on species evolutionarily close to humans. In addition, we analysed matrilineal communities such as Minangkabau, located at Indonesia, Asia; Mosuo, at China, Asia; and Umoja, at Quenia, Africa; and also two Brazilian social groups with traces of matriarchy, denominated Noiva do Cordeiro and Quebradeiras de Coco, for current alternatives that have dissociated from the prevailing patriarchy. In particular, Umoja and Noiva do Cordeiro were created in response to the preponderant sexism and violence suffered by its founders and other women, who came together to remodel their future actively. The ethological analysis allowed understanding the emergence of patriarchy, showing some socio-cultural contexts, such as sedentarism, language and parental preference, in certain cultures, as promoting its formation. Throughout this research, it was also noticeable that the number of scientific and academic studies on non-patriarchal societies, mainly in the scope of ethology, is quite little. Overall, the present study reveals a contrast between the patriarchy and distinct contemporary social configurations which have detached from feminine subordination, evincing that it is possible for our social systems to change and that we can carry out such transformation, as we understand and reflect about these processes.

Patriarchal hegemony from an ethological perspective and other social systems

Evolutionary theory supports the development of scientific explanations of the biological, behavioral, cognitive, and cultural diversity found around the world. Despite the wide ranging interdisciplinary nature of evolution science, evolution education in the general education context remains almost exclusively within the domain of the biology classroom. To engage this challenge and opportunity in a systematic fashion, the OpenEvo project has emerged as a Networked Improvement Community for evolving an open, networked, and interdisciplinary evolution education research community. The network is organized around principles of sociocratic governance, and focused on creating the conditions for innovations in interdisciplinary evolution education to emerge and thrive. The Concepts & Theory Circle has begun a critical analysis of the internationally recognized Understanding Evolution Conceptual Framework for guiding evolution teaching across K-16 (general education and undergraduate) contexts. The Research Circle is working to develop novel assessment tools for measuring conceptual learning about evolution as an interdisciplinary science, and the supports needed to engage in empirical research on the proposed revisions to the Understanding Evolution Conceptual Framework. The Teacher Education Circle is working to develop open syllabi for model teacher education courses and professional development programs to support teaching evolution as an interdisciplinary science. We will highlight the challenges and opportunities presented by this work, describe the current state of core projects within the network, and discuss the potential for teaching cultural evolution science to emerge as an essential educational innovation needed to foster an understanding of our changing world adequate to the challenges of the moment.

Evolving an open, networked, and interdisciplinary evolution education research community

Institutions of modern societies have often been argued to evolve, but their evolution is rarely examined in Darwinian and empirical terms. Here we use the categorical data set MaxRange on nations’ regime-types and their constituting institutions historically for analysis of their phylogeny. The MaxRange data set covers all nations in the world system of nations since 1600 with details on accountability structures, executive strength and degree of centralization, constitutional strength, democracy and other aspects of the political systems. We describe and analyze the character of the “true phylogeny” of regime-type evolution in the nations of the world 1600--2020. Our results indicate that evolutionary network rather evolutionary tree models have superior fit to data. Using the extracted phylogeny, we also investigate the dynamic networks of nations in terms of regime-types, accountability structures and their related background factors such as religions and language. Network centrality measures of nations and regime-types provide new important explanatory variables for network-adjusted survival analyses of various institutions, from types and levels of democracy to details of regime-types, including institutions like parliamentarism, presidentialism, and their hybrid forms.

An Evolutionary Political Science: How Modern Nations Evolved Institutionally

Politics today is often characterised as a single dimension which represents a conflict, brought about by modernisation and industrialisation, between the hierarchy and traditionalism of the establishment and people seeking equity and change. Here we review evidence that contemporary politics reflects not one, but two fundamental dilemmas, and that these ‘dual foundations’ of politics are not unique to modern nations, but are inherent to life in all human groups. Human interdependence creates two dilemmas which require people to hold ideas about what is to be done. One dilemma concerns conflict between cooperation and competition. This dilemma leads to differences of opinion regarding the extent of equality and inequality. The other dilemma is about the coordination of collective activities. This dilemma leads to conflicts about the extent of social control. We use anthropological evidence from the Human Relations Area Files, and other literature from anthropology and related disciplines, to extend psychological work showing that these two fundamental dilemmas of group living lead to two dimensions of political conflict and ideology across a large diversity of societies. We end by arguing that quantitative approaches to studying political psychology beyond the experiences of industrialised nations will advance research in both anthropology and psychology. The dual foundations provide the big picture which can tie together the study of human politics across societies and disciplines.

We find the dual foundations of political ideology across the diversity of human social life

In this research I explore the hypothesis that it can be beneficial to the fitness of cultural variants if they channel the energy of the individual who adopts the variant away from biological reproduction and toward the reproduction of the cultural variant. I label this the “inverse correlation hypothesis of cultural maladaptation.” This hypothesis is based on the observation that human biological reproduction is expensive in terms of energy and time. Therefore, cultural traits that minimize reproduction consequently make available resources that an individual could utilize instead to propagate the cultural trait in question. This hypothesis is usually advanced as a plausible explanation of extreme cultural traditions that reduce sexual reproduction to zero, such as celibacy. My first task is to discuss the implications of this hypothesis and to argue that, although it has merits, it has only been given a superficial scientific treatment in the literature, which is unfortunate. The reason for this, I argue, might be due to a vague theoretical distinction between, on the one hand, cultural maladaptive traits that nullify biological fitness and, on the other, selectively neutral or non-adaptive cultural traits that do not affect fitness values. My second task is to articulate an adequate theoretical framework that makes the inverse correlation hypothesis a scientifically respectable explanation of cultural maladaptation. I discuss some theoretical and empirical challenges that this hypothesis faces, but that they are not fatal as they are well-trodden by evolutionary biologists and philosophers.

The inverse correlation hypothesis of cultural maladaptation.

I will highlight a funding scheme that I am running on behalf of the Cultural Evolution Society. The scheme will address issues that will transform the important, yet underfunded, field of cultural evolution. How our cultures evolve (including how information is transmitted, how people make decisions, and the interaction with our biology) is a pressing issue in a world in which our cultural activities are causing rapid, and drastic, social and physical changes. Through 16 research projects, 5 applied working groups, 5 workshops, 1 landmark conference, 3 capacity building training courses, and public engagement activities, the grant aims to tackle early career obstacles, western-centrism, traditional disciplinary divides, and division of scientists and public policy makers. Join me for more information, videos on specifics, and open discussions. In the meantime further details can be found on the cultural evolution society website.

Transforming the Field of Cultural Evolution and Its Application to Global Human Futures

Previous research has sought to explain the rise of right-wing populist leaders in terms of the evolutionary framework of dominance and prestige. In this framework, dominance is defined as high social rank acquired via coercion and fear, and prestige is defined as high social rank acquired via competence and admiration. Previous studies have shown that right-wing populist leaders are rated as more dominant than non-populist leaders, and right-wing populist/dominant leaders are favoured in times of economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict. In this paper, we explore and critique this application of dominance–prestige to politics. First, we argue that the dominance–prestige framework, originally developed to explain inter-personal relationships within small-scale societies characterised by face-to-face interaction, does not straightforwardly extend to large-scale democratic societies which have frequent anonymous interaction and complex ingroup–outgroup dynamics. Second, we show that economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict predict a preference not only for dominant leaders, but also for prestigious leaders. Third, we show that perceptions of leaders as dominant or prestigious are not fixed, and depend on the political ideology of the perceiver: people view leaders who share their ideology as prestigious, and those who oppose their ideology as dominant, whether that ideology is liberal or conservative. Fourth, we show that political ideology is a stronger predictor than economic uncertainty of preference for Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election, contradicting previous findings that link Trump's success to economic uncertainty. We conclude by suggesting that, if economic uncertainty does not directly affect preferences for right-wing populist leaders, other features of their discourse such as higher emotionality might explain their success.

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Nonhuman Animal Culture: Meaning in Practice

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