Denmark

**Author(s):** Faessler, L; Lalive, R; Efferson, C &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Cultural evolution theory implies that social learning can lead cultural groups to differ in the same environment and drive genetic selection. Yet, distinguishing the effect of culture from other confounds is a difficult empirical challenge. To meet this challenge, we exploit the Swiss language border, a cultural border that divides Switzerland without any institutional boundary. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate discontinuities in attitudes right at the cultural border. Preliminary results confirm multiple discontinuities related to health and fertility. German speakers are more likely to adopt healthy behaviors and vote against initiatives to share health care costs, while French speakers visit the doctor more often. German speakers report significantly better health but surprisingly do not live longer. Our results provide new evidence that social learning generates cultural variation without environmental variation in health and fertility domains, thus demonstrating the potential for cultural processes to create variation in domains directly related to genetic fitness.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

How Culture Affects our Fitness: Evidence from a Swiss Language Border

gene-culture coevolution; health; fertility; causal identification of culture; quasi-experimental design; language border

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

**Author(s):** Faessler, L; Lalive, R; Efferson, C Cultural evolution theory implies that social learning can lead cultural groups to differ in the same environment and drive genetic selection. Yet, distinguishing the effect of culture from other confounds is a difficult empirical challenge. To meet this challenge, we exploit the Swiss language border, a cultural border that divides Switzerland without any institutional boundary. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate discontinuities in attitudes right at the cultural border. Preliminary results confirm multiple discontinuities related to health and fertility. German speakers are more likely to adopt healthy behaviors and vote against initiatives to share health care costs, while French speakers visit the doctor more often. German speakers report significantly better health but surprisingly do not live longer. Our results provide new evidence that social learning generates cultural variation without environmental variation in health and fertility domains, thus demonstrating the potential for cultural processes to create variation in domains directly related to genetic fitness.

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.

 Cultural evolutionary science (CES) applies evolutionary theory to culture and cultural change. A central ambition of CES is to synthesise the social sciences. However, for this synthesis to take place, a culture concept is needed that can be consistently applied. In CES, culture is paradigmatically conceptualised as socially transmitted information. Yet, this definition is met with critique from CES

Synthesising the Social Sciences Through a Mechanistic Conception of Culture for Cultural Evolutionary Science

**Author(s):** Toyokawa, W; Gaissmaier, W Introduction: When it comes to making decisions, like choosing a restaurant or political candidate, most of us rely on limited information that is not accurate enough to find the best option. Considering others’ decisions and opinions can help us make smarter choices, a phenomenon called “collective intelligence”. Collective intelligence relies on individuals making unbiased decisions. If

Conformist social learning leads to self-organised prevention against adverse bias in risky decision making

**Author(s):** Brar, P; Camargo, C; Introduction
Language has long been one of the main objects of study in cultural evolution. There are competing hypotheses about nearly every aspect of how it evolves over time. The Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD) was introduced in 2020 as a searchable database of causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics, to help researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative and design future research. In this process, CHIELD has also become a record of the development of evolutionary linguistics as a field. Methods
In this paper, we use network science methods to perform a scientometric study of the evolution of evolutionary linguistics. We create a multipartite network composed of 413 papers, 735 authors, and 1745 variables such as "population birth rate" and "linguistic complexity", and perform community detection on different sections of the network. Results & Discussion
We provide an account of the growth and diversification of evolutionary linguistics as in CHIELD, identifying key actors and factors in the field's evolution. Finally, we discuss the role of databases in cultural evolution and scientometrics.

The evolution of evolutionary linguistics

**Author(s):** Restrepo Ochoa, N; Acerbi, A; Introduction: Individual exploration and social learning play a key role in cultural evolution. If culture is the key to human success, social learning is the mechanism that allows for the transmission and refinement of cultural tools. We have evidence that people are keen foragers of social information. However, recent work also highlights a contradictory finding: people, in many circumstances, underuse social information – i.e. they copy others less than what would be predicted by theoretical models. In this talk, I will present a model that examines this tension. Methods: This is a simple model, where agents live in an environment that consists of a fixed number of "traits". Each trait changes with a specific probability, and agents try to track these environmental changes by either exploring individually or learning from one another. We vary the extent to which the environment changes, as well as the accuracy of social learning. Results: We show that, when we parametrize the model using rate of changes comparable to the experimental conditions under which social learning has been examined, exploration and social learning are worthwhile. However, we also explore more stable cultural environments, simulating distributions where few traits change frequently and the majority change rarely, plausible given current evidence about the rate of cultural change. In these situations, learning can often be counterproductive, especially if it is subject to error and/or if there is the possibility of deception, and the best strategy is not changing much at all. Discussion: Given realistic conditions of environmental change, our agents use social learning at rates comparable to the rates observed experimentally. A key implication is that we need more empirical work that seeks to measure rates of environmental change (and not only cultural change).

Stubborn Agents: examining the underutilization of social learning

**Author(s):** Herzog, N.; Clark, M. We investigate the socioecological conditions which favor the combination of individual and social learning that manifest in the invention and innovation of technology. First, using an agent-based simulation, we predict how ecological variation, population structure, and the costs and accuracy of social learning can affect cultural transmission patterns and cultural variability. Then, we compare archaeological case studies in the American Great Basin and Southwest to test how environmental variation and population structure influence patterns of cultural variation, invention, innovation, and investment in new technologies over time.

From mind to matter: Modeling the ecology of social learning and its archaeological outcomes

**Author(s):** Park P. S.; Savitskiy, V.; Henrich, J. Introduction:
To study the evolutionary puzzles posed by the egalitarian small-scale societies that likely dominated our ancestral past, we develop a cultural-evolutionary model of human groups. It models how the innovation, exchange, and specialization of human groups are affected by their social norms. 
Approach:
In our model, young individuals either apprentice with elder specialists (e.g., hunters, fishers, healers) or innovate new specializations. Elder specialists decide how many apprentices to take on, how much to produce, and how to distribute this production (for intra-group and inter-group exchange) among themselves and their apprentices. These decisions are constrained by the group’s sharing norms. 
Findings:
Long-term group fitness is maximized by a social norm of egalitarianism, which robustly leads to the innovation of the optimal number of specialized niches. In contrast, non-egalitarian groups suffer from a long-term penalty to innovation, and thereby to group fitness. However, non-egalitarian groups' penalty to innovation can be reduced if their young people are acculturated to be overconfident about the prospects of innovating versus apprenticing. 
Discussion:
Egalitarian groups of ancestral humans may have outcompeted their non-egalitarian counterparts due to their greater diversity of specialized niches. Humans’ capacity for overconfidence may have evolved in response: to incentivize innovation at the group level, especially in non-egalitarian societies.

A theory of specialization, exchange, and innovation in human groups

**Author(s):** Sánchez-Villagra, M. R.; Bertazoni, C. Introduction: Archaeological records of dogs in the Americas extend to 10kbp. Domestic dogs (DD) are seemingly ubiquitous in the Andean region, whereas Amazonian Amerindians are claimed to have lacked domestic dogs until recent historical times. Ontological features of the latter have been claimed to explain this pattern. 
Materials/Methods: Published records from HRAF and those found from other standard search approaches were collected, thus allowing us to synthesize archaeological (burials, ceramics, osteological), ethnographic (myths) and historical (chronicles) data. 
Findings: Our database comprises circa 100 records. The temporal and geographic patterns of occurrence of DD among Amerindians reveal gaps of information reflecting sampling bias more than lack of them. Our documentation of myths across cultures shows that DD occupy different positions in pre-Columbian and colonial times, probably reflecting changes in human-dog relation. 
Discussion: The apparent Andean/Amazonian divide in the existence of DD in South America is perhaps reflective of prevalence of discipline efforts. Linguistic studies suggest at least some exchanges between Andes and Amazonia for some regions. The archaeological and ethnographic record of DD in the Caribbean suggest previous presence of them in at least some Amazonian regions given well supported hypotheses of human migrations in those areas.

Towards a cultural macroevolution of dog domestication in South America

**Author(s):** Tylén, K; Fusaroli, R; Rojo, S; Heimann, K; Fay, N; Johannsen, NN; Riede, F; Lombard, M Introduction: The Blombos and Diepkloof engravings from South Africa are among the earliest evidence of human symbolic behavior. Of special interest is the temporal trajectory spanning 40 thousand years from earlier simpler parallel lines to later complex cross-hatchings suggesting an adaptive development. We follow up on earlier work (Tylén et al 2020) by investigating the cumulative cultural processes giving rise to these structural changes. We seed transmission chains with early line carvings to compare experimental developments to those observed in the archaeological records. 
 Materials and Methods: 66 participants were divided in 11 chains of 6 generations. Each participant replicated 4 patterns by dragging, rotating and placing lines, and these patterns were presented as stimulus for the next generation. Another 61 participants then participated in a suite of 5 experiments to test the relative saliency, perceived intentionality, memorability, style, and discriminability of the patterns from different generations. 
 Results/discussion: While several of the measures evolve in directions similar to the archaeological records, there are also differences suggesting that transmission alone is not the mechanism by which the Blombos and Diepkloof patterns evolved.

Using transmission chain experiments to investigate the cumulative cultural evolution of the Blombos and Diepkloof engravings

 How do groups of people playfully exploring an open-ended activity build on one another's ideas? What can short-term ethnographic observations of people engaging in playful tinkering tell us about the generation and movement of new ideas through groups?In a recent workshop I invited 14 artists and academics to play with and modify solar powered drawing machines to make marks they felt were aestheticall y interesting. Six more participants were asked to take on the role of "catalysts" by attaching themselves to a pair of tinkerers, documenting new ideas as they emerged, and sharing them with other participants to catalyze the spread of new ideas. The resulting video and notes were edited into a map describing the movement of different ideas through the group. Such a map can be characterized as a map of their collective exploration of what Kauffman called the "adjacent possible." Early observations and selected interviews of participants suggests that the generation of new ideas is complex, with many inputs. It also suggests that those who are skilled at collective aesthetic exploration are utilizing a set of skills that we can begin to characterize.

Collective Creativity in Open-Ended Aesthetic Explorations

 Art is typically understood to be in the eye of the beholder, suggesting that interpretation and aesthetic appreciation is highly subjective in nature. But does this also apply to the perceptual process itself? Or is human perception shaped by more general principles and biases? In the present science-art collaboration, we focused on the perception of color and asked: Could small but systematic differences in individual people’s color perception converge towards more basic patterns when colors are transmitted from one person to another? To investigate this question, we conducted an experiment in a public community space (Dokk 1 in Aarhus) as part of a larger science-art collaboration under the name Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting. The experiment was based on the original artwork Your uncertainty of color matching by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (2006). In the present task, individual visitors were asked to match a given color shown as a half-circle on a computer screen. The matching was done by moving a mouse cursor over the screen, thereby varying hue and saturation of a reference color half-circle. When participants were satisfied that they perceived the two colors as equal, they submitted their match and their newly matched color became the input for the following participant. In other words, we constructed a chain of color matches across participants. Our central hypothesis was that colors would converge over generations towards more basic colors (e.g. a prototypical red or blue). The analysis of 6 chains with 15 generations provided partial confirmation as some of the chains did indeed move towards more basic colors. However, we also observed much variability, leading to other, more wave-like transmission patterns. These data are discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of color perception and the accumulation of individual differences in transmission chains as well as more broadly in terms of conducting research in science-art contexts.

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Synthesising the Social Sciences Through a Mechanistic Conception of Culture for Cultural Evolutionary Science

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