Denmark

**Author(s):** Snyder, K; Sellers, M; Creanza, N Introduction&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;
Environmental stress, especially during development, can cause impaired learning in individuals. Thus, learned behaviors, such as birdsong, may exhibit unique evolutionary dynamics after severe weather events relative to other traits. We predict that ecosystem-level stressors may cause population-level changes to birdsong as cohorts experience early-life stress, learn songs imperfectly, and tutor future generations. &lt;br&gt;
Approach
In 2016, an unprecedented drought affected western New York. We analyzed publicly available and our own birdsong recordings from 2010-2020, comparing two species in the drought-affected area and a nearby unaffected area. We also developed an agent-based model of song evolution after environmental stress.&lt;br&gt;
Results and Conclusions
We found drought-associated song changes in the species with more complex songs but not in the species with a simple song, implying that stress-induced deficits may disproportionately affect traits that are more difficult to learn. With our model, we found important factors for enduring cultural evolution after stress: population isolation and stressor duration. Together, these results demonstrate that climatic events can induce population-level trait evolution due to disruption in learning.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Cultural evolution after environmental stress: a case study of songbird populations affected by the 2016 New York drought

songbird evolutionary ecology; computational biology; developmental stress; evolution of behavior; cultural transmission; environmental changes

Discover the art of creating extraordinary science at SEB’s Annual Conference at Le Corum Conference Center in Montpellier, France from 5 to 8 July 2022.

SEB’s Annual Conference is celebrated for creating the perfect composition of research, new discoveries and collaborative connections. Be creative and innovative by exchanging ideas and knowledge with masters of biology from all over the world.

2022 will find over 1500 experimental biologists from across the globe converging on the third-largest French city near the Mediterranean coast and the fastest-growing city in the country over the past 25 years.

Please register for the conference by clicking on this link:

https://www.sebiology.org/events/seb-annual-conference-2022/registration.html

The site will be open for registered participants closer to the event.

SEB Annual Conference 2022

2022 will find over 1500 experimental biologists from across the globe converging on the third-largest French city near the Mediterranean coast and the fastest-growing city in the country over the past 25 years - Montpellier, France

**Author(s):** Snyder, K; Sellers, M; Creanza, N Introduction 
Environmental stress, especially during development, can cause impaired learning in individuals. Thus, learned behaviors, such as birdsong, may exhibit unique evolutionary dynamics after severe weather events relative to other traits. We predict that ecosystem-level stressors may cause population-level changes to birdsong as cohorts experience early-life stress, learn songs imperfectly, and tutor future generations. 
Approach
In 2016, an unprecedented drought affected western New York. We analyzed publicly available and our own birdsong recordings from 2010-2020, comparing two species in the drought-affected area and a nearby unaffected area. We also developed an agent-based model of song evolution after environmental stress. 
Results and Conclusions
We found drought-associated song changes in the species with more complex songs but not in the species with a simple song, implying that stress-induced deficits may disproportionately affect traits that are more difficult to learn. With our model, we found important factors for enduring cultural evolution after stress: population isolation and stressor duration. Together, these results demonstrate that climatic events can induce population-level trait evolution due to disruption in learning.

technical paper

### Welcome to the fourth Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2022! 

As last year, Underline will support the online component of the conference. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, we seek to offer a hybrid format that will hopefully allow some folks to travel to Aarhus, others to meet up locally or regionally in CES hub-lets, and other yet to participate online. 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.

##### ***For SoMe interaction and live tweeting please tag @CulturalEvolSoc and use #CESconf2022***


#### The CES 2022 local organising committee
* Luseadra Joy McKerracher
* Jesper Sørensen 
* Niels Nørkjær Johannsen 
* Benjamin Grant Purzycki 
* Mette Løvschal 
* Felix Riede
* Iza Romanowska 
* Karsten Olsen

Please click on the button bellow if you want to watch the videos

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.

Introduction: Focusing on clothing and adornment (dress), this worldwide cross-cultural comparison asks why people in some societies appear to dress in uniform or standardized ways, whereas in other societies individuals display considerable variability in dress. Materials/Methods: Hypotheses are tested on 80 societies drawn from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). The central hypotheses consider the impact of general societal tightness or looseness, degree of egalitarianism, societal complexity, and resource stress. Exploratory methods identify four latent constructs of dress from newly coded variables, one latent construct for tightness/looseness, and one latent construct for resource stress. Results: As expected, increased societal tightness was positively related to increased standardization and rules regarding dress and increased resource stress is generally related to more standardization of dress and rules regarding adornment. Societies mid-range in complexity have more standardization. Contrary to expectations, the predictors of tightness-looseness differ from the predictors of dress. Discussion/Conclusion: While some of the theorized relationships are supported, at the end of paper we discuss some puzzling findings, speculate about possible explanations, and suggest further lines of research.

Uniformity in Dress: A Worldwide Cross-Cultural Comparison

Religion and Reality

Learning and Human Development

Social Categories and Relationships

**Author(s):** Borg, JM; Buskell, A; Kapitany, R; Powers, ST; Reindl, E; Tennie, C The goal of Artificial Life, as articulated by Chris Langton, is “to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be.” The study and pursuit of open-ended evolution in artificial evolutionary systems exemplifies this goal. However, open-ended evolution research is hampered by two fundamental issues; the struggle to replicate open-endedness in an artificial evolutionary system, and the fact that we only have one system (genetic evolution) from which to draw inspiration. Here we argue that cultural evolution should be seen not only as another real-world example of open-ended evolution, but that the unique qualities seen in cultural evolution provide us with a new perspective from which we can assess the fundamental properties of open-ended evolution. Here we highlight the interesting case of human cultural evolution as an open-ended evolutionary system and contextualise cultural evolution under the framework of evolved open-ended evolution. We go on to provide a set of new questions that can be asked once we consider cultural evolution within the framework of open-ended evolution, and introduce new insights that we may be able to gain about evolved open-endedness as a result of asking these questions.

Evolved Open-Endedness in Cultural Evolution: A New Dimension in Open-Ended Evolution Research

 Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE)—defined as the process by which beneficial modifications are culturally transmitted and progressively accumulated over time—has long been argued to underlie the unparalleled diversity and complexity of human culture. In this talk, I will argue that not just any kind of cultural

Open-ended cumulative culture depends on the gradual exploitation of natural phenomena

**Author(s):** Tennie, C; Reeves, J S; Snyder, W D The earliest claims for copying-dependent know-how in the human lineage are linked to stone tool production (knapping) techniques. These conclusions would be invalidated if knapping-technique-naive humans could learn how to knap in baselines – i.e. absent cultural access to the underlying know-how. Previous human knapping studies have tested subjects after various types of such cultural access were provided to them (e.g. verbal instructions). However, no level of knapping found in these studies can prove that the provided types of cultural access were necessary. The cultural access provided in these studies may have merely sped up (or replaced) individual learning. This leaves open the possibility that knapping-technique-naive humans would innovate knapping techniques on their own, if given a sufficiently long baseline. We tested human participants (N = 28) for individual learning of early knapping techniques in a long (4h) baseline. Post-test questionnaires showed that subjects had been knapping-technique-naive at test. Despite an absence of cultural access to their know-how, the vast majority of subjects individually innovated knapping techniques (in press; Sci Adv). This data attests the unsuitability of early knapping techniques as “smoking gun evidence” for copying-dependent know-how in the archaeological record.

Early knapping techniques do not require know-how copying

**Author(s):** Matzig, DN; Warnock, R; Marwick, B; Riede, F The use of phylogenetic methods for the of study macroarchaeological processes of cultural evolution has long been advocated for, especially for the study of artefact shape. Due to technical limitations, the use of discrete character traits in these efforts prevails, which comes along with a non-trivial set of challenges. However, recent methodological advances in palaeobiology (Parins-Fukuchi 2017; Zhang, Drummond, and Mendes 2021) allow us now to infer Bayesian phylogenies using continuous characters. In this article, we present an exploratory analysis of cultural evolution in the European Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic (~15.000-11.000 BP) using a time-scaled Bayesian phylogeny based on the outline shape of lithic tools obtained from legacy data via 2D outline based geometric morphometrics. We estimate the rates of diversification and trait evolution in artefact shape, and test whether the recovered patterns correlate with the climatic and environmental changes within this timeframe. While common in cultural evolutionary analyses of language, the extension of Bayesian phylogenetic methods to archaeology represents a major methodological breakthrough.

An analysis of European Late Upper Palaeolithic stone tool evolution using a Bayesian phylogenetic framework

 Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information” (Laland and Hoppitt, 2003, p. 151). Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals (Dean et al., 2014) it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds (Rendell and Whitehead, 2001; Aplin, 2019; Whiten, 2021). More recently, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has taken on this distinguishing role (Henrich, 2015; Laland, 2018). CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” (Tomasello, 1994) gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual (Sasaki and Biro, 2017). Mesoudi and Thornton (2018) define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-human animals that places emphasis on some performance measure of traits increasing over time. They suggest this emphasis is also pertinent to cultural products in the aesthetic domain, but is this the case? Music, art and dance evolve over time (Savage, 2019), but can we say they gain beneficial modifications that increase their aesthetic value? Here we bring together perspectives from philosophy, musicology and biology to build a conceptual analysis of this question. We summarise current thinking on cumulative culture and aesthetics across fields to determine how aesthetic culture fits into the concept of CCE. We argue that this concept is problematic to reconcile with dominant views of aesthetics in philosophical analysis and struggles to characterise aesthetic cultures that evolve over time. We suggest that a tension arises from fundamental differences between cultural evolution in aesthetic and technological domains. Furthermore, this tension contributes to current debates between reconstructive and preservative theories of cultural evolution.

From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to Cumulative Cultural Evolution?

Introduction: The spatial composition of human portraits obeys historically changing cultural norms. It is also affected by cognitive factors that cause greater spontaneous attention to what is in front rather in the back of an agent. Scenes with more space in front of a directed object are both more often produced and judged as more aesthetically pleasant. This leads to the prediction that, in profile-oriented human portraits, compositions with more space in front of depicted agents (a “forward bias”) should be over-represented. Materials and Methods: We analyzed a large dataset (total N of 1,831 paintings by 582 unique identified European painters from the 15th to the 20th century) collected from WikiArt and for which we measured how the free space was distributed around the sitter. Results: In line with a forward bias, painters tended to put more free space in front of, rather than behind, the sitters. We also found evidence that this forward bias became stronger when cultural norms of spatial composition favoring centering became less stringent. Discussion: This study exemplifies both the importance of cognitive factors in shaping cultural productions and how they interact with explicit cultural norms. I will also discuss how this case study –and others- have implications for using large-scale datasets that have become recently available, other types of methods, and specific frameworks.

Premium content

Cultural evolution after environmental stress: a case study of songbird populations affected by the 2016 New York drought

Downloads

Next from Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Uniformity in Dress: A Worldwide Cross-Cultural Comparison

Similar lecture

Conserving threatened coastal wildlife during rapid environmental change: using biological responses to inform management strategies of giant clams

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES