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 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

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

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

explanatory pluralism

new mechanistic philosophy

the culture concept

cultural evolution

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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):** 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):** Abe, S; Tsuchida, S; Takezawa, M Cultural group selection (CGS) has been regarded as the most plausible theory which explains the evolutionary process of group beneficial norms. The key mechanisms of CGS are called intergroup conflict, which takes multiple forms and propagates the group's beneficial cultural traits in a population. Abe et al. (2021) experimentally investigated whether payoff-biased imitation, a form of intergroup conflict, diffuses the group beneficial traits across groups playing an n-person stag-hunt game. They showed the frequency of group beneficial traits increased faster when payoff-biased imitation across groups was feasible. In this study, we analyzed the participants’ decision processes by fitting and comparing five individual/social learning models employed by McElreath et al. (2008). Both the model simulations and model comparison analyses showed that participants’ choices were best explained by the hierarchical model of payoff-biased social learning and frequency-dependent social learning. Our results suggest that cultural group selection processes are driven without lethal intergroup conflicts with the help of payoff-biased imitation, which supports the result of Boyd & Richerson (2002)’s model.

Cultural evolution of group beneficial norms: The analysis of social learning strategies by computational modeling

**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):** Tamura, K; Noshita, K; Nakagawa, T; Kaneda, A; Nakao, H Introduction
Datasets on prehistoric human activities have been used to investigate cultural evolution in the past. Although information included in much of these datasets are coded by experts and aggregated at a population level for cross-cultural studies, data on individual artifacts and biological remains can be efficient in answering questions related to cultural variation within a population and to facilitate transparency by testing different coding schemes. 
Materials and Methods
We digitized over 700 pottery and 1,300 human skulls in prehistoric Japan to construct 3D models. As an example, by quantifying morphological variation in the 3D models of pottery using geometric morphometrics, we investigated the spreading process of pottery associated with the spread of rice farming in the western part of the prehistoric Japanese archipelago. 
Results
Pottery in the same geographical regions, though loosely, formed clusters and clusters in geographically neighboring regions tended to be morphologically similar. 
Discussion
Our results are consistent with the route of the spread of rice farming, suggesting that morphological variation in pottery was at least partly shaped through the process of descent with modification. We further discuss possible applications of our dataset, such as quantifying the relative importance of demic and cultural diffusion in the spread of agriculture.

A new dataset of three-dimensional models in prehistoric Japan

**Author(s):** Kaše, Vojtěch; Glomb, Tomáš Introduction
In this paper, we offer a diachronic computational text analysis of a large corpus of ancient Greek inscriptions, especially focusing on changes in their religious and moral content. Comparing our results with proxy data on economic development of the Ancient Mediterranean, we suggest that our analysis offers important insights into the cultural evolutionary dynamics of religions in general.

Materials and Methods
The paper is based on PHI, a comprehensive dataset of ancient Greek inscriptions. In total, it contains 218,162 inscriptions and 4,419,743 words. We analyze semantic trends in the inscriptions during the period from the 8th c. BCE to the 4th c. CE using the methods of distributional semantic modeling (word-embeddings).

Results and Discussion
Our results indicate a high extent of fluctuations in the moral load of inscriptions over time. However, our attempt to statistically compare our results with other data concerning the economic and demographic development of the Ancient Mediterranean reveals clear methodological limitations of our approach.

The Cultural Evolution of Graeco-Roman Religions in the Light of Epigraphic Evidence: A computational approach

 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.

Color Matching: Cultural transmission in a science-art context

**Author(s):** Borofsky, T; Feldman, MW; Ram, Y Introduction:
Despite being widespread, the benefit of cooperative hunting (CH) is unclear. When rare, CH may allow predators to escape competition and access "big prey" (BP). However, a lonely CH predator cannot catch food. Cultural transmission may allow CH to spread fast enough so cooperators can find hunting partners, but there is a catch: competition for BP will rise. 
 Methods: We model a one-predator, two-prey model in which the predators either learn to hunt "small prey" (SP) alone, or learn CH to target BP. The predators first learn vertically and then choose partners from whom they learn horizontally at rate $H$. CH predators only catch the BP if their partner is cooperative. 
 Results: Without horizontal learning, CH cannot spread from rarity. High rates of horizontal learning, combined with competition for the SP, allow CH to evolve. However, the CH can only fix in the predator population if the BP is very abundant.
 Discussion:
Competition for prey is not enough to explain the initial evolution of CH. We found that the addition of horizontal learning allows CH to spread, but future models should explore other factors that can select for CH, such as territorial defense.

Cultural transmission, competition for prey, and the evolution of cooperative hunting

 The development of studies on cultural evolution in Argentine Patagonia is linked to the pioneering work of Luis Alberto Borrero, who during the 1980s and early 1990s introduced both, processual and evolutionary thinking in the archaeology of the area. From these initial proposals we can highlight the need of a materialist approach to technology centered on variation along the explicit use of evolutionary models. Then, the focus was set in to address technological change, by taking into account past environments and space variability. Based on these foundational proposals, our work seeks to understand the tempo and mode of technological change in hunter-gatherer societies throughout the Holocene. Modeling these broad-scale processes presented challenges that we have addressed through the development of quantitative methodologies such as geometric morphometrics, spatial analysis and experimental based models. Likewise cultural phylogenetics helped us to model temporal trajectories of stone tools, in particular, projectile points. In this presentation I will discuss our work oriented to assess the role of space and environment in lithic technology as well in the emergence and diversification of technological lineages. Last but not least, our research shows that technological change in Patagonia is multidirectional, multicausal and complex, demonstrating the resilience and adaptive capacity of the hunter-gatherer societies of the Holocene of Patagonia.

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