Denmark

 This project is an exploratory study of folk intuitions about the moral domain, conducted in the U.S., China, India and Pakistan. Theorists disagree widely about how to define morality, so the science of morality has no principled way to identify its own target domain. This gives rise to many irresolvable debates. However, new methods in experimental philosophy make it possible to replace the theoretical debate over definitions with an empirical research program, by “defining” morality according to the folk concept, rather than theoretical principles. The study illustrates how the right intuitions can be measured, and how the data bear on the scientific debate. 
Such intuitions evolve culturally, however, so these intuitions may vary too widely for the folk concept to be coherent. To address this, the study spanned the distinct cultures of Western, Chinese, and Indian civilization (N=1,612). A questionnaire elicited judgments of “moralness” for a set of normative claims that represents the scientific debate. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to distinguish moral clusters from non-moral ones, and to identify sub-clusters within the moral domain. Results showed striking agreement across all samples in the moral domain’s scope, and only minor disagreement over internal structure. This supports the conclusion that the empirical approach to identifying the moral domain is viable.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

An Empirical Approach to Identifying the Moral Domain

moral psychology; experimental philosophy; moral domain; concepts

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.

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):** Nakamura, E; Singh, R While previous studies on music evolution focused on analysis of trends in features in historical data, construction of a mathematical model that can predict the evolution of the distribution of musical products remains as a challenge. This is especially because the distribution of music styles in a society has a complex structure consisting of clusters that dynamically change.
To understand these complex dynamics, we developed statistical modeling methods and analyzed two large datasets of popular music created in Japan and the US.
We found that intra-cluster dynamics, such as the contraction and shift of a cluster, as well as inter-cluster dynamics represented by clusters' relative frequencies, often exhibit notable dynamical modes that hold across different cultures. Moreover, we developed an evolutionary model incorporating these dynamical modes and showed that it is effective for predicting the future creation style distributions.
Our results indicate the importance of an accurate model of cluster dynamics for predicting future distributions of cultural artefacts. The proposed methodology is general and can potentially be applied to other domains of creative culture.

Predictive modeling of dynamic cluster structure of popular music creation styles

**Author(s):** Shilton, D; Passmore, S; Savage, PE Singing is involved in the most crucial events defining social life. One important feature of music performance is its sociovocal organization, ranging from unaccompanied solo to a multi-part chorus. It was previously hypothesized that this feature is related to social organization, so that emphasis on solo singing is more common in large-scale hierarchical societies, while levelled group singing is more common in small-scale egalitarian ones.

We analyze two global song corpora: Cantometrics (5,776 coded recordings from 1,026 societies) and NHS Ethnography (4,709 coded ethnographic texts from 60 societies). We examine the prevalence of group singing, and fit multilevel models predicting sociovocal organization based on social context and measures of social complexity.

We find that in both corpora, group singing is more common overall and in most societies, and its likelihood is dependent on social context. Social complexity is associated with greater likelihood of solo singing and more leader-dominant group singing.

These results support previous proposals that music is primarily a communal phenomenon and that sociovocal organization and social complexity are functionally related.

Group singing is globally dominant, and is related to both social context and social complexity

**Author(s):** Anglada-Tort, M; Harrison, P M C; Jacoby, N Introduction: 
In most human cultures, music and speech are sustained through oral transmission. How do cognitive and motor constraints in this process shape the evolution of music? Music corpus studies have been particularly useful to characterize common and diverse features observed in human songs across cultures (Mehr et al., 2019; Savage, 2015), yet these studies fail to quantify how and why these features emerge. Alternatively, iterated learning experiments provide a powerful quantitative tool for studying how transmission biases shape the evolution of language and music. However, such experiments have traditionally been conducted in nonautomated laboratory settings, making data collection costly while limiting the ability to explore the full space of evolutionary possibilities. 
 Methods: 
Here we present the first large-scale cultural evolution study on human song, quantifying the evolution of thousands of melodies transmitted orally across participants. Our method is applicable to individuals from any cultural background and works efficiently on computers available to most participants online. We perform many variations of this paradigm, including varying the total number of notes per melody (3-12 notes), adding memory load and motor constraints in the singing task, or naturalistic singing.
 Results: 
We show that cognitive and motor constraints in oral transmission play a profound role in the emergence of melodic structure. Specifically, initially random tones develop into more structured systems that increasingly reuse and combine fewer elements, making melodies easier to learn and transmit over time. Importantly, melodic features that emerged artificially from our experiments are largely consistent with melodic universals observed cross-culturally (e.g., small intervals, discrete scales, and tonal structures). Parallel to this, we find that evolving melodies tend to align with melodic pleasantness (estimated by a separate rating experiment with Western listeners) and musical exposure (estimated by a large corpus of popular Western melodies). 
Discussion: 
Taken together, our results provide the first quantitative characterization of the rich collection of biases that oral transmission imposes on music evolution, giving us a new understanding of the emergence of musical universals and the resulting vast structural diversity of human song.

Large-scale online iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission effects in the evolution of human song

**Author(s):** Angel, H.-F., Seitz, R. Beliefs have a life on their own: they are born, grow, expand, and eventually may fade away and get extinct. It is relatively easy to describe beliefs and the believing processes in similar terms to living beings, and to apply to them a similar axiomatic as the evolutionary model provides: variations, selection, adaptation, and reproduction. In the current wild and accelerated state we witness the formation of new beliefs in our time: thanks to the development of new media and social networks beliefs clearly follow patterns of variation, selection and successful reproduction, but the living cycle is now often shorter and riskier. In any case, we need a better knowledge of the evolution of beliefs, both in the long run, or from a historical perspective, and in the short run, following current trends. What seems clear is that the current study of cultural evolution would greatly benefit from inputs from the new scientific study of beliefs and believing processes. The Creditions model offers opportunities to work out that link and to enrich the framework of cultural evolution.

The evolution of beliefs and believing as a case for cultural evolution

**Author(s):** Foster, D; Mesoudi, A; Postma, E; Lamba, S Introduction: We aimed to test evolutionary theories of cooperation in the context of a real-world social dilemma: joint liability microfinance. To do so we meta-analyse predictors from microfinance studies to estimate their overall associations with loan repayment, and to assess the uncertainty and generalisability of these estimates. Methods: We pre-registered our meta-analytic protocol and hypotheses, conducted literature searches, screened studies for eligibility and assessed their risk of bias, and developed Bayesian multilevel models to estimate meta-analytic associations between loan repayment and proxies of 4 evolutionary mechanisms proposed to support cooperation: relatedness, reciprocity, partner choice, and punishment. Results: Punishment-based variables showed the strongest positive associations with loan repayment, with mixed results for other mechanisms. Estimates vary widely in their certainty, with high levels of effect heterogeneity. Conclusions: Our results provide some evidence for evolutionary mechanisms supporting cooperation in real-world contexts, and suggest there are non-generalisable findings and/or reproducibility issues in the microfinance literature.

Meta-Analysis of Predictors of Cooperation and Loan Repayment in Microfinance Groups

**Author(s):** Brand, C O; Smaldino, P E. Complex behaviours are said to be transmitted from one person to another via high-fidelity social learning mechanisms. However, many behaviours are too opaque to be learnt via imitation alone, and require teaching with verbal communication. Although human language facilitates the explanation of complex behaviours in precise detail, we argue that direct, literal communication is overly costly and inefficient in many cases. Instead, humans use shortcuts such as analogies that enable compression of meaning (Brand et al. 2021). In their model of tacit knowledge, Miton & Dedeo (2022) find that “a small amount of guidance, well-presented, allows students to lock-in a culturally-widespread practice”. We predict that the “well-presented guidance” relies on analogies that relate novel behaviour to familiar behaviour in the learner’s repertoire. We present a formal model in which behavioural components are formalised as nodes in a network, and analogies as shared relationships between the edge-structures of different networks. We will present preliminary work on the model and its implications for Cultural Evolutionary theory, and for the origins of language and cognition.

Analogy as a critical component for communicating complex cultural information

**Author(s):** Miton, H; DeDeo, S Introduction: A wide variety of cultural practices take the form of “tacit” knowledge, whose principles are neither obvious to an observer, nor known explicitly by experts. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners cannot spot the principles to imitate, and experts cannot say what they are doing, how can tacit knowledge pass from generation to generation? 
Approach and Methods: We present a domain-general model of “tacit teaching”, drawn from statistical physics, that shows how high-fidelity transmission of tacit knowledge is possible. It applies when the
practice’s underlying features are subject to interacting and competing constraints.
 Results: Our model predicts a tell-tale distribution of teaching outcomes, with some learners being near-perfect performers while others receiving the same instruction are disastrously bad. The evolution of tacit knowledge is also expected to be bursty, with long periods of stability interspersed with brief periods of dramatic change, and
where tacit knowledge, once lost, becomes essentially impossible to recover. 
Discussion: This general model could be applied to diverse cultural practices, as long as they can justifiably be understood as a network of constraints. This also suggest that when practices are constrained enough, it might not be necessary to evolve high-fidelity transmission mechanisms.

The Cultural Transmission of Tacit Knowledge

**Author(s):** Eruchimovitch, I; Michaeli, M; Sarid, A To unravel the roots of the relationship between the Individualism-Collectivism dimension of culture (IC) and market-supporting institutions, we develop a micro-founded model in which the two interact and coevolve. IC and institutions are related indirectly, via social organization: Individuals settle either in the Market, an individualistic, interest-based organization, or in the Clan, a collectivistic, kinship-based organization. In a static model, the size of the Market positively depends on the strength of individualistic inclinations and on the quality of market-supporting institutions. In a dynamic model, where IC and institutions are endogenous, there exist up to two stable steady states, one with a predominately individualistic culture, high institutional quality and a large Market, and one with a completely collectivistic culture, no institutions and a desolate Market. The convergence to each steady state depends on initial conditions of IC. We conclude that contemporary IC and institutions exhibit path dependence and are thus related to the historical conditions in each region. Using institutional and historical data, we provide empirical evidence in support of our model. In addition, we apply the model to a specific historical case: the cultural and institutional divergence between China and Europe.

On the Coevolution of Individualism and Institutions

**Author(s):** Barrera-Cruz, M; García-Rivero, D The study of lithic assemblages enables an approximated knowledge about the economic activities of past populations. Here, lithic tools from Dehesilla cave are examined alongside the remains of organic resources, such as the remains of fauna, seeds and fruits to achieve a reconstruction of the production patterns documented in the Southern Iberian Peninsula throughout the entire Neolithic period. While direct and indirect gradient analysis are carried out to allow detection of patterns between the different Neolithic periods, diversity analysis is useful to generate some information about variability of environmental exploitation strategies. Results show a significant increase in volume of the vegetable resources in the Middle Neolithic A (MNA), when the naked wheat (Triticum aestivum-durum) predominates, in addition to a differential replication of tools related to vegetal and landscape transformation activities. In conclusion, the analyses suggest a change in the subsistence patterns in the MNA (ca. 4800-4500 cal BC) in opposition to the previous Early Neolithic period, which is characterized by a mixed and more diverse economy (livestock and agriculture), such as a more diverse assemblage of lithic tools.

POPULATION ECOLOGY IN ARCHAEOLOGY: AN APPROACH TO THE NEOLITHIC OF DEHESILLA CAVE, SOUTHERN IBERIAN PENINSULA.

 The terms “culture” and “cultural group” admit several readings. A prevalent one takes them to be sortals: terms that pick out countable entities. I’ll call such countable entities sortal cultures. Sortal cultural are frequently used in policy, jurisprudence, and empirical work. These are entities usually picked out with national or ethnic labels, like “the Basque” or “the Kwakwaka’waka”. Because they facilitate counting, sortals require two criteria: one for identifying the entities at stake (a criterion of application) and another that tracks their existence over time (a criterion of identity). 

Recently, philosophers have fleshed out these criteria by analogy to the phylogenetic account of species. Identifying similarities, these authors suggest sortal cultures should be underpinned by a similar metaphysical picture: relational essentialism. This, I’ll suggest, is sensible—but doesn’t fully specify the criteria needed. Further pursuing the analogy between species and culture puts pressure on current accounts, and suggests four possible routes forward: to (i) merely use the analogy instrumentally; (ii) adopt analogize a different species concept; (iii) abandon the idea that cultures are lineages, or; (iv) adopt a “rank-free” account of culture. I’ll close by highlighting the novelty—and plausibility—of (iv), that cultures should be understood as “rank-free” entities.

Premium content

An Empirical Approach to Identifying the Moral Domain

Downloads

Next from Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Predictive modeling of dynamic cluster structure of popular music creation styles

Similar lecture

Foreclosing Democracy, Representing Survival: City-Building, Martial Rule, and Political Society in Contemporary Pakistan

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES