Japan

The cultural evolutionary perspective is currently being adopted by scholars of early Christianity and the Bible. This paper looks at how the perspective can change the study of the apostle Paul and Pauline traditions. Pauline studies are still dominated by a discourse on the real, historical Paul. What did Paul really say or mean and who understood him correctly? Are all the letters in the New Testament canon written in Paul’s name really by Paul himself? The questions of origins and authenticity are emphasized by religiously and academically motivated theologians alike. The perspective of cultural evolution, with its idea of the naturalness of variety, can profoundly challenge this baseline. 
Another question concerns the study of the transmission of Pauline ideas in Christian and other literature and practice. This “reception of Paul,” as it is called in the Biblical Studies, although widely studied, has often been captive of the authenticity discussion but also suffered from a lack of rigorous scientific methods and explanations for the transmission of cultural information. The transmission of Pauline ideas includes the idea of Paul himself as either a positive ingroup prototype or a negative outgroup stereotype. Both appear in literature with fascinating variations but tend to be discussed separately because of their affiliation with competing groups. The cultural evolutionary perspective, however, can help to highlight the shared nature of traditions between different groups and hopefully even act as a vehicle for interreligious understanding.

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

How can cultural evolution change the study of the apostle Paul?

Welcome to the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) Conference 2024, which was a hybrid conference held at Durham University (UK). The conference was hosted in Durham by the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) with administrative assistance from the CES Transformation Fund team.

**For more information about the CES Conference, please visit the [CES Website Home Page](https://ces2024.webspace.durham.ac.uk/).**

#### Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) 
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
**Interdisciplinary study of cultural change and diversity**

We are a highly interdisciplinary group of researchers using evolutionary models to study cultural change and diversity. We apply cultural evolutionary methods to a wide variety of topics including cognition, innovation, social learning, technology, art, music, narrative, religion, sociality, language and communication. We have a growing interest in applying cultural evolutionary theory to current societal challenges such as understanding the spread of prosocial health behaviours and health conspiracies. 
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Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

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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.

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Selection for more efficient socially learned behaviors over alternatives is crucial for cultural evolution, however our understanding of this process of cultural selection in animals is limited. Using artificial populations of wild-caught great tits (Parus major), we conducted a cultural diffusion experiment to ask whether more efficient foraging traditions can replace an established tradition, and how this process might be affected by turnover. We show that gradual replacement of individuals greatly increases the probability that a more efficient behavior will out-compete an established inefficient behavior. Turnover does not increase innovation rates, but instead increases adoption rates, as immigrants are more susceptible to the novel, more efficient behavior. We go on to show that this effect might extend beyond birds by using an an agent based model to test the effect of turnover across populations of different types of learners. Altogether, these results provide strong evidence for cultural selection for efficiency in animals, and highlight mechanisms that link population turnover to this process.

The importance of population turnover for the evolution of efficiency

Argument-making, the giving of reasons to believe something, is a central feature of modern life. Ideas spread and are selected for in part because of the arguments we can make on their behalf. While long-standing philosophical accounts parse arguments into deductive, inductive, and potentially abductive patterns, we know very little about the patterns people actually deploy in real-world situations. This leaves us blind to a key selection mechanism in the cultural evolution of ideas. To address this gap, we combine simple tools from natural-language processing with a corpus of over one million argument-making posts in the Reddit forum r/askphilosophy, the “rationalist” website LessWrong, and a corpus of academic articles in philosophy. Our analysis reveals a system of argument-making patterns entirely distinct from the traditional Aristotelian taxonomy. In particular, we show the existence of a certainty-doubt pattern, associated with arguments that compare and contrast relative confidence, a category-making pattern, associated with arguments that consider the sharpness or vagueness of category boundaries, and a question-rephrasing pattern, associated with revising and rewriting a standard view. These provide new insights into social cognition, the dynamics of argument-making in interpersonal exchanges, and the ways that ideas may thrive, or not, on the basis of the argument-patterns they make possible. Our work provides a “plug-and-play” tool for other researchers to analyse the argument patterns their own corpora of interest, and suggests the possibility of new, joint endeavors to look for the universals of argument-making across culture and time.

Argument-Making in the Wild

We review and discuss the role of collaboration in cultural transmission experiments. Collaboration (or collaborative learning) is considered an important variable in human cultural evolution. However, we argue that this is an aspect often underestimated in experimental studies of cultural transmission. We conducted a critical review of cultural transmission experiments to assess whether collaboration takes place, and whether it is a variable of interest in those studies. We found that collaboration is seldom investigated in those studies. We discuss reasons for this and potential future avenues for research.

The role of collaboration in cultural transmission experiments

Evolutionary and cognitive scientists have taken a keen interest in religion, developing theories of its emergence and persistence across cultures. These theories make quite different predictions about atheism. Specifically, cognitive byproduct accounts describe religion as nigh inevitable, and atheism as requiring special cultural scaffolding and cognitive effort to maintain. Dual inheritance approaches, however, describe religious beliefs as emerging only in the presence of consistent context-based learning cues; in this view, atheism naturally results in the absence of consistent cultural cues that one ought to believe in a specific god. We pitted these perspectives against each other by testing the hypothesis -- derived easily from a dual inheritance perspective -- that children of parents whose religions subtly might be less religious and more prone to atheism than are children whose parents display consistent religious cues. Across three large and representative sets, we found consistent evidence that children of mixed-faith parentage are less religious than their consistent-faith-parent peers. In one analysis targeting only USAmericans who grew up in families in which both parents were Christians, children whose parents merely differed in Christian denomination were reliably more likely to become atheists than were children from denominationally-consistent families. This work speaks to the subtle cultural factors that can naturally produce atheism, the important role of context-biased cultural learning in supernatural belief, and the general utility of incorporating cultural evolutionary perspectives in the evolutionary study of religion.

Children of mixed-faith parents are less religious

In darkness and alone, humans fear various “unseen others” – ghosts, monsters, burglars, animals. Previously, I captured such intruder fear accompanied by the intuition of unseen humans’ presence: the “Unpleasant Feeling of Sensed Presence” (UFoP). Initially, Cognitive Science of Religion explained (supernatural) agents’ encounters through the (hyperactive) agency detection module. Following the current critique of cognitive modularity, I argue that it is more promising to think about agency detection in the context of the domain-general mechanism of cognition, the predictive processing. Predictive processing allows context-sensitive learning of respective predators relevant to different ecological and social settings without the need for agent-related fear’ innateness. However, I also argue that the basic fear of predators creeping in the shadows can be understood as a psychological adaptation, considered from Charles Darwin’s times. Therefore, I see ghosts and other scary agents as a product of two intertwined traits – genetically inherited prior schemata and socio-cultural learning, both equally manifesting in a psychological level of personal experience under the condition of uncertainty. In my paper, I will closely describe the presented theoretical argument and illustrate it empirically by the specific UFoP experience captured during my previous studies.

Sensing spirits and other dangerous beings: “Hardwired” intuitions, or cultural learning – or both?

This paper studies the impact of social learning on the formation of close-knit communities. It provides empirical support to the hypothesis, put forth by the historian Fred Shannon in 1945, that local soil heterogeneity limited the ability of American farmers to learn from the experience of their neighbors, and that this contributed to their "traditional individualism." Consistent with this hypothesis, I establish that historically, U.S. counties with a higher degree of soil heterogeneity displayed weaker communal ties. I provide causal evidence on the formation of this pattern in a Difference-in-Differences framework, documenting a reduction in the strength of farmers' communal ties following migration to a soil-heterogeneous county. Using the same design, I also show that soil heterogeneity did not affect the social ties of non-farmers. The impact of soil heterogeneity is long-lasting, still affecting culture today. These findings suggest that, while understudied, social learning is an important determinant of culture.

Learning is Caring: Soil Heterogeneity, Social Learning and the Formation of Close-knit Communities

Studies of the origin and evolution of high-level cultural trait complexes have recently become a focus of attention and research has begun to show the interaction of ecological, economic, and political factors in the evolution of human societies (e.g., Whitehouse et al 2018). This paper presents a case study of the evolution of science, relating stages in this evolution to cognitive heuristics; considered from the perspective of the need to avoid their associated cognitive illusions. Science is a good subject for this since it has well-defined goals that places strict limits on methods that can be employed and forms of cognition consistent with these goals. Three decision heuristics discovered by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) correlate with three crisis periods in the history of science. Each crisis required discovery of methodological tools to avoid associated illusions. The sequential development of science serves as a phylogenetic lineage (Boyd et al 1996). The lesson this presents for today is the necessity of discovering ways to harmonizing different sets of cultural values. 

Whitehouse, H. et al (2018) A new era in the study of global history is born but it needs to be nurtured. Journal of Cognitive Historiography 5(1-2). 
Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1974) Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Science Vol 185, No. 4157, 1124 – 1131.
Boyd, R. et al (1997) Are cultural phylogenies possible? In P. Weingart, S.D. Mitchel, P.J. Richerson, and S. Maasen (eds.) Human By Nature: Between Biology and the Social Sciences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 355 – 386.

Evolution of Science as an Example of Cultural Evolution

The presenter will show how values impact culture and how the difference between tacit and lived values can be assessed to create and or manage culture to better meet the needs of the organization.

As organization’s shift into regenerative practices requires decisions to consistently be made in the same way and from the same principles that nature uses. This means a leadership style that will support a culture that understands and synchronizes with nature. The Resilient Value System supports this shift.

These assessments are designed to use the specific values found in the three known values systems (Protective, Effective, Resilient) as researched by Jane Jacobs and Kathryn Alexander. Thirty of these values appear to be common across national boundaries, and all 45 are well understood even though some have more resonance than others. Because these value sets are true systems, they exhibit the same dynamics as other living systems do, revealing a new understanding of corruption.

What is unique about these assessments is that they surface both tacit and lived values. By bringing to awareness tacit values that are commonly not available for discussion, and by seeing the graphic tensions between the two both individuals and groups (teams, departments and entire organizations) can recognize: fit, agreements about the desired state, and clear directions for mutually desired change.

The presenter will:
• Describe how these sets of values express living systems attributes
• Explain the impact seeing these values as systems has on ethics and corruption
• Share the three value systems and their connections to culture
• Share examples of the assessment results and describe how they can be understood and used for leadership and culture development
• Provide a short experience so attendees can experience their own preferences and understand the implications

The Impact of Values on Leadership Style and Culture Development

The landmark 2016 discovery of the HOLON/parton structure of all units of culture - deriving from a 2016 PhD study, and first published in the book `Creative Technologies for Multidisciplinary Applications’ (2016) - has since been applied in other domains of culture, being subsequently republished in the `Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology’ (2017, 4th edition), also `Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Simulation, and Human-Computer Interaction’ (2019), and the `Encyclopedia of Creativity’ (2020, 3rd edition). This powerful new tool - integrating the Three Laws of HOLON/partons - enables scientific identification and analysis of units of culture, including Numerals (Mathematics); Words (Languages); Narremes / units of story (Narratives); Transmedia (Narrative); Movies (Cinema); Television (Screen Media); Novels (Prose Fiction Books); Factual Literature (Prose Non-Fiction Books); Videogames (Games);; Plays (Theater); Popular Song (Music); Poems (Literature); Jokes (Standup Comedy); Paintings (Visual Art); Myths (Narrative); (Adaptive Fictions); Conspiracy Theories (Adaptive Fictions); Scientific Models/Theories (Science); Ideologies (Political, Economic, Religious); Inventions (Technology); Art (Communication Media); Values & Ethics. When used in conjunction with the Fractal Systems Meta-model of Bio-cultural Evolutionary Creativity, these two scientific models enable examination of the units, levels and mechanisms of cultural evolution, in any domain in culture. The 5 prior book chapters on this discovery (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020) are currently being expanded to a full-length book (due for release, November 2021). This talk presents these two new scientific models - as powerful tools - for use by students, scholars, and scientists of Cultural Evolution.

The HOLON/parton structure of units of culture, and Evolutionary Culturology

How do we integrate the evolutionary dynamics of populations with the cultural context of individual minds? One way involves combining common ancestry approaches to cultural evolution with a dynamical representation of the cultural milieu. This yields a flexible representation of complex cultural systems, encompassing trees (logistic maps and phylogenies) and highly-reticulating (fractal structures and hairball networks) structures alike. 

We characterize the outputs of Contextual Geometric Structures (CGS) in the context of nonlinear and cyclic outputs. CGS models are computational kernels that represent cultural phenomena in conceptual space. CGS kernels draw from a number of theoretical concepts, including: conceptual blending, structuralism/post-structuralism, and fuzzy computation. A single CGS can be of any shape, and are used to classify perceptual inputs as singular or multiple semantic interpretations. These shapes are mapped to natural phenomena such as light, temperature, and rotational forces that a population of individuals might encounter via sensory experience. In a similar way, multiple cultural contexts can be represented in the same space, which can be accessed by a single agent, or even multiple agents. 

We will show how agent-based models of cultural dynamics can be used to unlock the potential of neural representational models. CGS kernels can also be combined with connectionist and agent-based models to yield multiple representations of the cognitive world. Most relevant to cultural evolution, CGS kernels provide a generative model of cultural diversity, which allows us to examine the combinatorial richness of the evolutionary process.

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