Denmark

 I propose a mathematical model of cultural evolution to explain why false theories and meaning systems or maladaptive beliefs may spread and become fixed in a population while assuming that their diffusion rates are lower than their true counterparts. By combining ideas from judgment aggregation and the Condorcet Jury theorem with cultural evolution dynamics, I introduce a new epistemic stage in the cultural evolution process where culturally transmitted theories not only spread “horizontally” (across individuals in the same generation) and “vertically” (from one generation to the next), but also inside individual brains (“personal reflection process”). This occurs when a brain adopts a maladaptive theory (not received from outside) by means of internal inference from other false premise/idea that was indeed received culturally. In this context, false theories may favor the assumption of other false theories after the individuals have been exposed to true information about their logical connection, and increase their presence in the population within the normal and adaptive logical working of our brains. Using a simple stylized model and subsequent simulations I identify the parametric conditions in which false theories become universally accepted, so that the model could be tested empirically.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

The evolution of false theories

beliefs formation; epistemic cultural evolution; personal reflection; gene-culture co-evolution; evolution of knowledge

### 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

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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.

technical paper

**Author(s):** Sobchuk, O; Youngblood, M; Morin, O Why do some artists achieve extreme popularity? A theory of first-mover advantage, developed in economics, may partly explain this. It suggests that companies that enter a new market niche early on become more successful. We hypothesize that the first-mover advantage can explain the popularity of songs. A musical genre is analogous to a niche, and early representatives of a genre may be considered first movers.

We use Spotify data: ~166,000 songs in 10 genres. To account for data biases, we do bootstrapping from a control mixed-genre dataset, built by sampling, for each genre, song corpora that are similar to the target genre: they have the exact same size and yearly distribution of releases but do not belong to any single genre. We have preregistered the prediction that the relationship between success (i.e. playcount) and time for the genre corpora should be more negative than for the samples taken from the mixed-genre corpora.

We find a more negative relationship between time and playcount for 8 genres, which supports the prediction; in the remaining 2 genres the difference is not significant.

Successful artists may owe their popularity to innovativeness in new artistic niches.

First-mover advantage in the evolution of music genres

 This paper will discuss the potential of using methods from digital humanities when studying the evolution of religions. The case at hand will be ongoing work on my doctoral thesis, in which I study separate developments in symbolic systems across the Indo-European religions. Digital methods, such as topic modelling, make it possible for scholars to look for patterns in large textual corpora. Combined with close philological readings, I believe this provides a more nuanced look into the symbolic system, religion, expressed in ancient texts. As an example, I will present my preliminary studies of the different layers of the Vedic Rigveda compared with the Old Iranian Gathas. In this study, digital methods will be an important tool in analysing patterns that unite and differentiate throughout the texts. When comparing the texts, these patterns may lead to not just reconstructions of earlier stages, but how these stages developed into the known religions. Thus, providing a better understanding of the shared Indo-Iranian heritage between the two texts, and the cultural evolutionary processes in the development of the individual symbolic systems expressed. As such, this paper will argue for the advantages of using digital methods when combining Indo-European studies and theories on religious evolution to view similarities, differences, and developments in the symbolic systems of large corpora.

Convenient collaborations: Using digital humanities in the study of the evolution of Indo-European religions

**Author(s):** Barrett, B; Kandler, A; Aplin, L Cultural evolution is usually framed in terms of transmission biases or behavioral transformation via cognitive biases, although there is a third dimension that is often ignored: learning through reward. This process of internal selection that happens when socially learned behaviors are used by individuals, has been hypothesized to play a critical role in the evolution of adaptiveness of cultural traits, as they are either maintained or abandoned over the course of repeated production. To date, this has remained a verbal argument. To test this argument, we construct an agent based model where acquisition and production are linked, as acquisition is conditioned on association, as well as behavioral frequencies of associates. We show that variation in the learning rules that govern production influence the diffusion of a novel behavior. We further show that these effects can affect the inferential power of two popular models in the field of animal culture: Network Based Diffusion Analysis and Experience Weighted Attraction models. We then allow for dynamic networks of populations, and show how the social process of population turnover interacts with reinforcement learning to drive the cultural evolution of efficiency. Different regimes of population turnover generate optimal, neutral or sub-optimal selection for a more efficient behavior, when compared against static populations. These two studies generate new predictions for how reinforcement learning can influence cultural outcomes, and highlight un-discussed consequences for current practices in the field. The formulation of our model also encourages more rigorous definitions for social learning strategies and biases, as they might target the process of acquisition or production, or both, yet have been discussed interchangeably to date. They also provide theoretical support for the hypothesis that naive learners, introduced through population turnover, play a crucial role in resampling payoff landscapes.

The interaction of learning rules and population turnover can drive cultural evolution

**Author(s):** Chira, A; Kirby, K.; Epperlein, T.; Kuehr, F; Bräuer, J. Introduction: Dogs show an extraordinaire capacity to understand, communicate, and cooperate with us. However, what we know about the social-cognitive skills of dogs comes from observations and experiments performed in WEIRD societies. Around the world though, dogs are kept for various functions, they are perceived and treated differently, suggesting cross-cultural diversity in the strength of dog-human relationships, and perhaps departures from the ‘typical’ suite of skills dogs are thought to possess. Materials & Methods: Here we address these issues by collecting data on the function and perception of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies using the eHRAF cross-cultural database. We hypothesize that dog-human relationships will be closer in societies where dog functions require intense cooperation between dogs and humans, i.e., hunting and herding versus guarding, defense, and carry animals. We characterize close dog-human relationships as increased primary caregiving (or positive care), decreased negative treatment, and an increased extent to which dogs are viewed as friends or kin. Results & Discussion: The number of functions dogs perform associates with closer dog-human relationships. Further, the presence of herding (and to a lesser extent, guarding herds, and carry roles) increases the odds of positive care given to dogs, while using dogs for hunting is linked with higher odds of dogs being treated akin to a person. These findings support the idea of cross-cultural variation in dog-human relationships and show how the strength of our bond with dogs can be linked with the function dogs fill in societies. The results are a first step towards challenging the notion that all dogs are the same, and fuel questions about the universality of cognitive and social skills we commonly associate with our canine friends.

Beyond WEIRD dogs - Cultural Differences In Dog Human Interactions

**Author(s):** Micheletti, AJC & Mace, R Introduction: Most major world religions require at least some of their practitioners to commit to lifelong celibacy. A recent evolutionary model has suggested that inducing a son to become a monk can be adaptive if it increases his brothers’ reproductive success and a sociodemographic study has shown that this is the case in a Tibetan Buddhist population. However, female celibates are present in other religions and parts of the world, and it remains unclear what might drive differences in their frequency relative to male celibates. Approach: Here, we develop an evolutionary, inclusive fitness model of the coevolution of male and female lifelong celibacy. Results: We find that the frequency of monks and nuns can be influenced by how parental resources are shared among offspring and how siblings compete for them. More monks than nuns are favoured when competition is more intense between brothers than sisters, that is when resources are more important for male than female reproductive success (bride price societies). The opposite is true when competition is more intense between sisters (dowry societies). We also find a role for the extent to which brothers and sisters compete for the same pool of resources, which is influenced by cultural inheritance rules and whether wealth is mainly immovable (land) or movable (money, cattle). Moreover, the sex that disperses less is favoured to have more celibates. Discussion: These results can help us explain observed differences in the frequency of monks and nuns in societies with different marriage systems, inheritance rules and post-marital residence rules.

Sibling competition and dispersal drive sex differences in religious celibacy

**Author(s):** Pichkar, Y; Creanza, N Introduction: Human culture is both a bearer of history and an active force in it. The history of cultures can resemble that of our genes, but the impact of cultural identity on long-term patterns of human interaction has not been extensively researched. We leverage increasingly available genetic and cultural databases to explore how culture has shaped populations in Great Britain. Approach: We used the Survey of English Dialects to produce a map of linguistic variation, a type of cultural variation. From the genetic data collected for the People of the British Isles project, we reconstruct previously found genetic clustering (Leslie et al. 2015). Using the genetic variation within and between clusters, we measured whether genetic variation coincides with dialect borders. Results: We find that these patterns are strongest in areas with larger cultural divides–near Scotland and Wales–but correlations also exist closer to the center of England. Conclusions: These patterns suggest that cultural boundaries have shaped people’s preferences for movement and marriage over the last millennium, and that cultural identity may contribute to establishing genetic differentiation in a region.

Cultural reinforcement of genetic boundaries in England

**Author(s):** Raymond C; Sánchez-Villagra MR; Rangel-de Lázaro G; Lynch, S; Ward S; Wilson LAB Intro: Intentional cranial modification (ICM), the application of materials to the cranium of infants to permanently alter the head shape, has a long history and is found throughout the world. We collated global records of ICM to trace the origin and dispersal of these practices. 
Methods: We collated published records for Central (n=271), South (n=53), and North America (n=54), the Caribbean (n=113), and Eurasia (n=252), recording geographic location (decimal coordinates), ICM type, biological sex, period, and date. The temporal sequence of ICM practice was assessed using spatiotemporal kernel density estimation in R with spatstat and sparr packages. 
Results: Our database comprised 743 records, spanning 40 countries across five regions. We found the highest incidence of ICM throughout the New World and identified clusters of diverse modification types and potential areas of missing data due to sampling bias in the archaeological record. 
Discussion: We present a global overview of potential areas and times of diffusion, and cultural convergence. There were probably multiple developments of CM, mirrored also in the different social contexts and modes in which CM has been recorded.

The temporal sequence and global spatial distribution of intentional cranial modification practices

**Author(s):** Hrnčíř, V; Chira, A Introduction: Alcohol is the most widely used human psychoactive and mind-altering drug. This is partly because its production is very straightforward: any substance that contains sugar can be converted into alcoholic beverage through the natural process of fermentation. Yet, many societies around the world did not know alcohol or forbade its consumption. Our goal is to discover which cultural and ecological factors can explain why some societies produce alcoholic drinks, while others do not.
 Materials & Methods: We coded data for native alcoholic beverages in 186 non-industrial societies (Standard Cross-Cultural Sample). We tested the effect of potentially predictive variables (obtained from D-PLACE) on alcohol production in Bayesian logistic regressions, while accounting for spatial proximity and common ancestry. 
 Results & Discussion: Our results confirm the intuitive assumption that the presence of Islamic religion and the absence of fruit trees and cereals cultivation predict the absence of alcohol. Importantly, we also confirm the strong correlation between the presence of alcoholic beverages and cultural complexity, which has been pointed out before but has not yet been empirically tested. The next step will be to uncover the evolutionary dynamics of this relationship.

Why don't they get drunk? Alcoholic beverages in non-industrial societies

**Author(s):** Tamariz, M.; Papa, A.; Cristea, M.; McGuigan, N. Introduction During our lifetime we typically learn several variants of a given cultural trait, e.g., from family, peers and experts. Social biases affecting which variants are adopted by learners are well-studied. Considerably less is known about influences on the selection of variants for onward transmission by transmitters. This study tests whether a social context congruence effect is in place, i.e., do we tend to transmit to friends behaviours that we learned from friends, to our children behaviours learned from our parents, and to novices behaviours learned from experts? Methods Each of 64 participants learned two cultural variants (methods to solve a puzzle): “E” from an Expert and “P” from a Peer. Then, we

Associative learning and cultural transmission: We teach to novices the variants we learned from experts, and to peers the variants we learned from other peers!

**Author(s):** Lee, H; Schönwiesner, M; Jacoby, N; Park, M

Background: Music is a rich cultural product that is practiced across all known cultures and throughout history, making it an attractive medium to study the transmission and evolution of culture. However, previous research on empirical analysis of music predominantly relied on Western songs, limiting our understanding to WEIRD countries. 
 Method: We introduce a novel dataset called GlobalPOP, which gathers music records from 55 countries since the 1950s by crawling web pages and manually transcribing from books and magazines. The dataset contains over 4 million entries and 254,234 songs with acoustic information, lyrics, and other meta-data gathered from various sources. 
 Results: Using this rich dataset, we provide a quantitative picture on how the general preference of music has converged and diverged across the globe over the last seven decades. Our preliminary findings indicate that most acoustic features reveal a country-specific or regional trend (e.g., danceability, tempo, energy) that can be grouped by the spoken-language and geographical proximity, whereas only a handful of low-level features can be considered as a global trend (e.g., song duration, loudness). 
 Conclusion: We present the first empirical work on the evolution of cross-cultural music preferences by making use of the most comprehensive longitudinal music chart data which will become open-access.

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