Denmark

**Author(s):** Greenhill, Simon J. Forkel, Robert &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Introduction:
The last few decades have seen the publication of many language phylogenies. These phylogenies have proven to be incredibly useful for testing hypotheses about linguistic and cultural evolution. However, they can be hard to get hold of and require detailed phylogenetic knowledge to maximise their re-use.&lt;br&gt;
Materials and Methods:
Phlorest is a database of published language phylogenies that aims to standardise the outputs of these analyses to make them FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). First, each analysis is preprocessed to a consistent format, providing a summary tree and a posterior tree sample, linked where possible to the raw data. Each taxon in the analysis is mapped to catalogues like Glottolog and D-PLACE. Currently, Phlorest contains 42 phylogenies, covering a total of 3470 taxa from 1974 languages.&lt;br&gt;
Results/Findings:
In this talk I will present Phlorest and discuss the benefits it provides. First, phlorest enables replicability and reuse of these trees. Second, having these phylogenies aligned in time and space enables us to compare patterns and processes across the globe. Third, phlorest allows us to scale up to bigger questions by combining trees into super trees. Finally, phlorest allows us to highlight interesting big picture findings from historical linguistics to the wider public, providing a highly visible resource that brings this research to a wider audience.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Phlorest: A database of consistent and reusable language phylogenies.

language evolution; phylogenies; cultural phylogenetics

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

**Author(s):** Greenhill, Simon J. Forkel, Robert Introduction:
The last few decades have seen the publication of many language phylogenies. These phylogenies have proven to be incredibly useful for testing hypotheses about linguistic and cultural evolution. However, they can be hard to get hold of and require detailed phylogenetic knowledge to maximise their re-use. 
Materials and Methods:
Phlorest is a database of published language phylogenies that aims to standardise the outputs of these analyses to make them FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). First, each analysis is preprocessed to a consistent format, providing a summary tree and a posterior tree sample, linked where possible to the raw data. Each taxon in the analysis is mapped to catalogues like Glottolog and D-PLACE. Currently, Phlorest contains 42 phylogenies, covering a total of 3470 taxa from 1974 languages. 
Results/Findings:
In this talk I will present Phlorest and discuss the benefits it provides. First, phlorest enables replicability and reuse of these trees. Second, having these phylogenies aligned in time and space enables us to compare patterns and processes across the globe. Third, phlorest allows us to scale up to bigger questions by combining trees into super trees. Finally, phlorest allows us to highlight interesting big picture findings from historical linguistics to the wider public, providing a highly visible resource that brings this research to a wider audience.

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.

**Author(s):** Pérez Velilla, Alejandro; Smaldino, Paul; Fedorova, Natalia Introduction: Risk-mitigation can be an important driver for the development of cultural practices and institutions. We concentrate on modeling the cultural evolutionary dynamics of sharing norms within clusters of individuals engaging in productive activities with associated risks, while sharing with each other at a cost. Through a process of growth and fission, sharing norms and sharer clusters evolve, leading to several possible configurations. Methods: Evolutionary game theory and insights from ergodicity economics are used to obtain results in a mathematical framework. Agent-based simulations are employed to generate simulated datasets with the future aim of interfacing with empirical data using Generative Inference. Results: Productivity increases the network carrying capacity of clusters as well as the optimal sharing norm, leading to more sharing in larger-sized clusters. Clusters can be at their densest in the regions of high variability, but sharing breaks down in both high-risk and high-security environments.

The evolution of sharing norms as cultural strategies for risk management

**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.

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

 Introduction: When the children of one ethnic group are educated by adults of a different ethnic group, cultural dynamics in one or both groups may be affected in ways that are poorly understood. Such a situation characterizes Western-style education received by, or imposed upon, many indigenous peoples. Here I examine changes in distributions of distinctive cultural norms across a range of domains among indigenous Matsigenka students and their Mestizo teachers in three boarding secondary schools in Amazonian Peru.
Methods: I use Bayesian item-response theory models to characterize the distributions of norms among students and teachers interviewed in 2017 and 2019, and compare them to such distributions among non-academic Matsigenka and Mestizos.
Results: The analyses suggest that, in some boarding schools, Matsigenka students may be adopting some of the distinctive norms of their Mestizo teachers. The extent of this pattern appears to be mediated by, among other things, the particular boarding school environment.
Discussion: I discuss these results in light of new theory predicting when and why members of a disempowered minority group will adopt norms of a powerful majority.

A longitudinal study of cultural dynamics in Amazonian boarding schools

**Author(s):** Defelipe, R. P.; Mendes, D.; França, I. F.; & Resende, B. Our goal was to provide a how-to guide to move infant observational research from lab to home. We searched four databases (Scopus, PubMed, Google Scholar, Frontiers in Psychology Special Issue) from January to February 2022, using ‘infant/children’, ‘online/web-based/tele-observation’, ‘pandemic/Covid-19’ as descriptors. Eligible papers were in English or Portuguese, investigated children up to 13 years, used remote technology, and applied observation as methodology. Most of the 60 papers were from Developmental Psychology, from North America (e.g. USA), investigated Caucasian infants up to one year, used supervised online platforms (e.g. Zoom), used computers instead mobiles or tablets, and put the child facing the screen or in face-to-face interaction with the parents. The studies mostly concluded that remote infant observational research is feasible, especially, if you: observe infants up to one year old; design a short (e.g. 5 minute-session) and simple (e.g. free-play) experimental tasks; has already met your participants in person; give financial feedback (e.g. Amazon gifts); and are not dealing with low-income population with unsuitable internet and/or technological devices. The extent to which in-person research can be adapted for remote settings needs future investigation to promotes targeted investment in innovation, design, implementation, and effectiveness.

Moving infant observational research from lab to home: partial results from a systematic review

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

**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.

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