Denmark

**Author(s):** Weber, T; Gerrits, L; Louçã, J &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Infrastructure projects like the plans to build a third runway at Munich airport are accompanied by complex public policy dynamics. The Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) would predict that policy in this case evolves in a punctuated fashion and not in smooth incremental steps. We test this for the case and complement PET with insights from a theory transfer we conducted earlier of the evolutionary theory of dissipative structures (TDS) from thermodynamics. We reconstruct the policy dynamics with qualitative content analysis of more than 700 articles from over 14 different newspapers over a period of 13 years. With our theoretical approach we identify the third runway project as a complex evolving policy system where competition between coalitions of actors and their collective understandings of the policy issue shape the structure of this system. Trust, formal and informal power are the control parameters which determine whether the coalitions are stable against deviating opinions or if these very opinions can drive the coalitions and the system to a new stable state. We have detected phases of stability interrupted by two policy punctuations in 2012 and 2018 and we can explain this evolution with a change of trust and power within the proponent coalition. The results demonstrate that a combination of TDS with policy theories can help to explain complex policy dynamics. We will continue the discussions on this with additional methods such as agent-based models.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Punctuated evolution in the complex infrastructure case of building a third runway at Munich airport – merging dissipative structures theory with public policy theories

public opinion

political culture

punctuated evolution

social complexity

public policy

complexity science

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

**Author(s):** Weber, T; Gerrits, L; Louçã, J Infrastructure projects like the plans to build a third runway at Munich airport are accompanied by complex public policy dynamics. The Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) would predict that policy in this case evolves in a punctuated fashion and not in smooth incremental steps. We test this for the case and complement PET with insights from a theory transfer we conducted earlier of the evolutionary theory of dissipative structures (TDS) from thermodynamics. We reconstruct the policy dynamics with qualitative content analysis of more than 700 articles from over 14 different newspapers over a period of 13 years. With our theoretical approach we identify the third runway project as a complex evolving policy system where competition between coalitions of actors and their collective understandings of the policy issue shape the structure of this system. Trust, formal and informal power are the control parameters which determine whether the coalitions are stable against deviating opinions or if these very opinions can drive the coalitions and the system to a new stable state. We have detected phases of stability interrupted by two policy punctuations in 2012 and 2018 and we can explain this evolution with a change of trust and power within the proponent coalition. The results demonstrate that a combination of TDS with policy theories can help to explain complex policy dynamics. We will continue the discussions on this with additional methods such as agent-based models.

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
Many domains of knowledge have grappled with the arrival of hypercompetent artificial intelligence. We might expect an efflorescence of AI-produced ideas. On the other hand, human-trained AI might simply reproduce or reinforce existing orthodoxies. The strategic impact of AlphaGo post-2016 on the game of Go serves as a data-rich case study.
 Methods
Using a large database of top-level human and AI play (62,740 opening sequences, 1956-2020), I study the diversity of opening sequences using multilevel regression models of recent social and individual covariates pre & post-AlphaGo. 
Results
The post-AI era has indeed seen an explosion of move diversity (Shannon entropy on opening sequences), reversing decades of decline. Since the 1990s, social trends have come to strongly predict individual first-move openings (b=3.77, psign<0.001), and, while pre-internet Go was characterized by a low correlation between strategy popularity and efficacy (R2=0.11), the post-AI era now sees a near-perfect correlation (R2=0.87).
 Conclusions
Human Go strategies are more diverse, more social, and apparently more efficacious under the influence of hypercompetent AI advisors.

Strategic Social Leaning in the Era of Hypercompetent Artificial Intelligence: A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Case Study using the Game of Go

 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.

The evolution of false theories

**Author(s):** Turner, MA; Moya, C; Smaldino, PE; Jones, JH Introduction Social learning is essential to human survival–it is a critical adaptation for dealing with uncertainty. However, uncertainty takes many forms. We identified four theoretically important types of uncertainty: temporal environmental variability, ambiguous payoffs, decision set size, and effective lifespans. We used this framework to study conditions for the evolution of social learning in populations with

Different forms of uncertainty differently affect the evolution of social learning

 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

 The human propensity to detect agents, not really present around is one of the oldest problems in CESR. But is there any causal connection with uncertainty? In the study, I was inducing via sensory deprivation a specific kind of such experience, i.e., the “Unpleasant Feeling of Sensed Presence” (UFoP), using the predictive processing theory.
UFoP was induced by 0.5h sensory (visual, auditory) deprivation trial, manipulating expectations about the being that could come during the process (using semantic priming), measuring biological data (PPG, EDA), capturing experience via post-deprivation surveys and interviews, and controlling for two psychological dispositions: imaginative suggestibility and fantasy proneness.
The main predictor of UFoP experience was felt uncertainty, moderated by suggestibility (but not by fantasy proneness), while semantic priming had no effect.
In my paper, I will further discuss if – under the condition of greater uncertainty – a) humans generally tend to detect agents due to evolved hyperpriors for the agent-related fear, b) we tend to (falsely) predict the presence of other agents because agents are the main source of uncertainty in our environments.

Sensing spirits and other dangerous beings: how uncertainty makes us feel the unseen presence

 Two important hypotheses compete to explain the human adaptation. The cognitive niche hypothesis proposes that gene-based evolution in the Pleistocene favored the evolution of information rich encapsulated cognitive modules adapted to the regularities of the Pleistocene environment. The cultural niche hypothesis argues that the hallmark of Pleistocene environments was extreme variability on millennial and submillennial time scales and that culture is an adaptation this. These hypotheses have very different implications for how the human mind/brain would work. Some neurobiologists for some time have argued that the cerebral cortex has to operate as an organ of phenotypic flexibility and that genes specify, in any detail, only the ancient emotional and vegetative parts of the brain. Recent neurobiological advances support this latter picture of cortical function. The ancient but rather generalized appetites and emotions provide the selective forces on the developmental time scale that also act as forces on the cultural evolutionary time scale. These advances tend to support the cultural niche hypothesis and are not consistent with the cognitive niche alternative.

The cognitive niche versus cultural niche hypotheses: The neurobiological evidence

**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

 Doctrinal religions have frequently been argued to underpin large-scale cooperation. Throughout their history, they have been accompanied by so-called ‘little traditions’: unorthodox religious practices and beliefs at best ignored by orthodoxy, and at worst derided as backward ‘superstitions’. Doctrine frequently claims that in contrast to orthodox ‘great traditions’, such little traditions are amoral, concerned only with the self-interested pursuit of material aims such as curing disease. This paper draws on historical sources to argue the contrary. Not only do little traditions typically carry moral concerns; they engender forms of moralising supernatural punishment (MSP) distinct from those of great traditions. Great traditions tend to propagate MSP beliefs that encourage contributions toward the extended ingroup of coreligionists. Little traditions tend to propagate beliefs enabling cooperation at a smaller scale. Having surveyed the historical evidence, the paper concludes by sketching a theoretical model of how religious traditions might coevolve by virtue of their ability to support cooperation at complementary scales.

Moralising supernatural punishment and cooperation in 'great' versus 'little' religious traditions: A historical sketch

**Author(s):** Peacey, S; Campbell, O.L.K.; Mace, R Introduction Cultures vary in whether they accuse more men or women of witchcraft (harming others through magic). We investigated why accusations target a specific sex in African Bantu and Bantoid societies. Accusations may be competitive, allowing accusers to access resources that the ‘witch’ could have used. For example, men may target male relatives when competing for wealth to marry; co-wives in polygynous marriages vying for their husband’s investment may accuse other wives.
Materials and Methods Data was coded from ethnographic records. We examined factors predicting whether ‘witches’ were male or female (N = 423) using multilevel logistic regression. 
Results Men commonly accused men: such allegations were frequently between nonrelatives and blood relatives, in disputes over inheritance or property. Accusations of women were often from affinal kin (mostly husbands and co-wives). 
Discussion/conclusion Associations between specific relationships and situations and the sex of accused witches suggest how ‘phenotypes’ may develop within societies. The results are broadly consistent with evolutionary patterns of conflict and competition.

Same-sex competition and sexual conflict expressed through witchcraft accusations

**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.

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Punctuated evolution in the complex infrastructure case of building a third runway at Munich airport – merging dissipative structures theory with public policy theories

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Strategic Social Leaning in the Era of Hypercompetent Artificial Intelligence: A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Case Study using the Game of Go

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