Japan

It is standard to understand natural selection as necessarily being blind or, to put it in less ableist terms, to exclude intentional design. Social scientists often critique cultural evolution theory as being redundant, on the grounds that the relevant explanatory work can be done in terms of intentional decisions made by humans. Cultural evolutionists often seek examples of outcomes that plausibly cannot be viewed as intentional – for example, Henrich focusses on the evolution of manioc processing, where the explanation of the benefits is thought to be opaque to most participants (Henrich 2017). 
Mesoudi 2008 gives us reason to think that intentional design should not guide the production of variants. But less has been said about why intention must be excluded when it comes to the selection of variants, as in cases of ‘direct bias’ (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Amundsen 1989).
I argue that we should resist this, and simply view intentional action by humans as one possible driver of a selection process. From the perspective of Universal Darwinism, as long as there is heredity and variation in copy rate, the presence of intention in an evolutionary process is irrelevant. If I am right, then a major source of skepticism about the value of cultural evolution theory in explaining processes such as the workings of science can be undercut, and the evidence base for cultural evolution theory hugely expanded. Intentional design need not exclude cultural evolution, but can, instead, be understood as one of its variables.

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

Why does cultural selection need to be blind?

### 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://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/underline.prod/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/1ef06ffd05f80957b4a5b685f63ee3ba.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fullprogram.pdf)
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**Program-at-glance**

![](https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/underline.prod/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/c0d0d4c8fcdad49d12631574fd966ae8.png)

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**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.

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### 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:**
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* Sustained disruption of talks or other events (including “Zoombombing”)
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* 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://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/underline.prod/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

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.

Examining Cultural Evolution with Contextual Geometric Structures

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.

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

Humans have a psychological tendency to support a strong leader in times of danger, but not in times of peace and security. This psychological pattern has evolved in primeval times as a way to overcome the collective action problem in violent inter-group conflict, according to a new theory called regality theory. People become authoritarian and bellicose as a reaction to perceived collective danger, while peace and security leads to egalitarian and tolerant political attitudes. This balance between authoritarianism and egalitarianism is reflected in many aspects of politics, culture, morals, sexuality, religion, and even in art and music. This makes regality theory very useful for many applications in sociology, history, psychology, politics, and peace research. Examples include explanations of the rise and fall of empires, World War II, psychological warfare, witch hunts, and psychological reactions to the terrorism events of 9/11.

Regality theory is supported by statistical studies on both ancient and modern societies. The theory has successfully predicted correlations between many cultural variables. 

Applications of this theory is discussed with several examples.

Authoritarianism and egalitarianism explained by evolutionary psychology

Cultural evolution is an interdisciplinary movement, but some disciplines are not yet well represented. Sociology -- despite sharing many core questions in common -- has hardly engaged with the field of cultural evolution. In this presentation, I briefly consider the reasons why sociologists have been absent from this conversation. Then I outline how sociologists can make a meaningful contribution to cultural evolution research. I argue that sociological research is especially relevant to work on changing beliefs, subcultural differences, cultural mechanisms of stratification, and the role of social networks in cultural change. I conclude by describing some concrete steps I believe will facilitate a greater integration between cultural evolution and sociology in the future.

Why does cultural selection need to be blind?

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Children of mixed-faith parents are less religious

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