Denmark

**Author(s):** Hong, Ze; Chen, Yuqi &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Introduction: The study of rhetoric and argumentation has a long history in the western intellectual tradition, yet relatively less attention has been paid to its relationship between other cognitive themes such as reasoning and epistemology, as well as cultural and historical variation in persuasion practices in non-western contexts. &lt;br&gt;Methods: We used keyword searches to identify persuasion episodes (763 total) in the official dynastic histories in China to systematically examine various rhetorical/argumentation strategies (e.g., argument by analogy, argument by authority, etc.) used in the past two millennia. &lt;br&gt;Results: We found that early dynasties tend to have higher recorded persuasion success with the notable exception of the Ming dynasty, and there appears to be a temporal decline in the frequency in rhetorical strategies associated with persuasion failures (e.g., analogy and the use of auspicious/inauspicious signs). &lt;br&gt;Conclusion: We found some support for adaptive cultural change in the type of arguments that people use. This study highlights the possibility of using rhetoric/argumentation as a tool to investigate reasoning and epistemology, as well as testing cultural evolutionary hypothesis using historical data.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Persuading the Emperors: A Quantitative Historical Analysis of Political Rhetoric in Traditional China

persuasion; argumentation; reasoning; chinese history; adaptive cultural change

### Conference Welcome

Welcome to the third Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2021. In the conference, which will be held from June 9-11, 2021, about 180 researchers from East Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Europe, North and South America give presentations on their latest research advancing the evolutionary understanding of human and nonhuman animal culture.

### Schedule and Program

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/1ef06ffd05f80957b4a5b685f63ee3ba.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fullprogram.pdf)
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/12285eb22580949635121d15d5b46325.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/abstracts.pdf)

**Program-at-glance**

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### Code of conduct

See the full details of [the code of conduct](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/).
&nbsp; 
 CES is dedicated to providing a welcoming and harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality, or the presence of or care for dependents. 
We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.

&nbsp;
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&nbsp;
 **Inclusiveness Committee**:
&nbsp;
 To facilitate implementing the code of conduct and foster a climate of inclusion, we have developed an inclusiveness committee. Below is their contact information:
 **Hiromi Matsumae**:	matsumae.hiromi.g@tokai.ac.jp
 **Patrick Savage**:	psavage@sfc.keio.ac.jp
 **Sarah Mathew**:	Sarah.Mathew@asu.edu
 **Gmail:** inclusivenessCES2021@gmail.com
 See [more details about reporting the harassment.](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/)

### Organizing committee

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**Scientific Committee:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home), [Yasuo Ihara (the University of Tokyo)](https://researchmap.jp/read0209180?lang=en), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Naoko Matsumoto (Okayama University)](https://researchmap.jp/nmatsumoto_okayama-u), [Masako Myowa (Kyoto University)](https://myowa.educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en), [Hisashi Nakao (Nanzan University)](https://www.hisashinakao.com/), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)

**Local Organizing Committee:** [Yutaka Horita (Teikyo University)](https://sites.google.com/site/yhoritapage/), [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io/), [Ayaka Takimoto (Hokkaido University)](https://lynx.let.hokudai.ac.jp/~takimoto/), [Kohei Tamura (Tohoku University)](https://researchmap.jp/7000017854)

**Inclusiveness Committee:** [Sarah Mathew (Arizona State University)](https://www.sarahmathew.net/), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)


![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/967110a00d200a6b20d6f4fa6556ba13.png)

For attending the conference, you first need to register and pay fees from [the link here](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/registration/). After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site. After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site

Registration fee

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

**Author(s):** Hong, Ze; Chen, Yuqi Introduction: The study of rhetoric and argumentation has a long history in the western intellectual tradition, yet relatively less attention has been paid to its relationship between other cognitive themes such as reasoning and epistemology, as well as cultural and historical variation in persuasion practices in non-western contexts. Methods: We used keyword searches to identify persuasion episodes (763 total) in the official dynastic histories in China to systematically examine various rhetorical/argumentation strategies (e.g., argument by analogy, argument by authority, etc.) used in the past two millennia. Results: We found that early dynasties tend to have higher recorded persuasion success with the notable exception of the Ming dynasty, and there appears to be a temporal decline in the frequency in rhetorical strategies associated with persuasion failures (e.g., analogy and the use of auspicious/inauspicious signs). Conclusion: We found some support for adaptive cultural change in the type of arguments that people use. This study highlights the possibility of using rhetoric/argumentation as a tool to investigate reasoning and epistemology, as well as testing cultural evolutionary hypothesis using historical data.

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):** Ben-Oren, Y; Kolodny, O; Creanza, N The transition to specialization of knowledge within populations could have facilitated the accumulation of cultural complexity in humans. Specialization allows populations to increase their cultural repertoire without requiring that members of that population increase their individual capacity to accumulate knowledge. However, specialization also means that domain-specific knowledge can be concentrated in small subsets of the population, making it more susceptible to loss. Here we use a model of cultural evolution to demonstrate that specialized populations can be more sensitive to stochastic loss of knowledge than populations without subdivision of knowledge, and that demographic and environmental changes have an amplified effect on populations with knowledge specialization. Finally, we suggest that specialization can be a double-edged sword; specialized populations may have an advantage in accumulating cultural traits but may also be less likely to expand and establish themselves successfully in new demes due to the increased cultural loss that they experience during the population bottlenecks that often characterize such expansions.

Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss

**Author(s):** Itao K; Kaneko K Anthropologists have observed gift relationships that establish social relations as well as the transference of goods in many human societies. The totality of social relations constitutes the network. Social scientists have analyzed different types of social organizations with characteristic network. However, the factors and mechanisms that cause the transition between these types are hardly explained. Here, we focus on the gift as the driving force for such change. We build the model by idealizing gift interactions and simulate the consequent social change due to long-term massive interactions. Through simulation, we demonstrate that as the frequency of the gift increases, the network structures are less clustered and more hierarchically organized. Also, the economic and social disparities successively emerge. These transition corresponds to the change from bands to tribes and to chiefdoms. Following this, statistical analysis using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, a global ethnographic database, empirically verifies the theoretical results on the emergence of disparities and hierarchical organizations due to the increase in the gift.

Transition of Social Organizations Driven by Gift Relationship

**Author(s):** Barrett, BJ, Wild, S., Martin JM, Aplin LM Adoption of novel food is a major challenge for animals living in urban environments; the spread of innovation and establishment of traditions is one potential mechanism enabling its incorporation. Experimental introductions into groups of the same population have been a classic method to examine this mechanistic pathway. However, most studies have focused on the social learning of foraging techniques, which may have different associated social or cognitive biases. In this study, we conducted a two option and control experiment, presenting two novel foods (shelled almonds, coloured red or blue) in five neighbouring roosts of sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita). We tracked the spread of knowledge across social networks from trained demonstrators, and used experience weighted attraction models (EWA) to ask: (i) how social learning biases shape the acquisition of a novel food, and (ii) whether similarities in processing techniques can emerge within roosts or social associates, even in a continuous population. Examining the solves of 355 individuals, we found age-related differences, with juveniles - but not adults - exhibiting a conformist bias, preferentially choosing the most frequently eaten food. Lastly, when analysing 539 openings by 147 individuals, we found evidence for site-level differences that increased with distance and decreased with movement between sites.

Cultural diffusion experiments with novel food reveal age-dependent conformity and potential foraging traditions in neighbouring groups of urban parrots

**Author(s):** Colleran, Heidi Introduction: The demographic transition still remains a mystery. A shift from vertical to horizontal transmission is deemed instrumental in the spread of low fertility values, but we lack a mechanistic explanation for such a shift. Women’s personal advice networks are where ideas about fertility practices are exchanged, and are key to understanding this change. We expect that economic and cultural changes in rural areas lead to increasingly valuing non-kin over kin, and ego characteristics influence these friendship dynamics. 
Methods:
Here, using comprehensive demographic and relational data from 22 communities in rural Poland, we investigated how women’s personal networks change with ego-level attributes, and how network characteristics affect cultural transmission. We focused on network composition and interaction, bi-lateral social support, closeness and emotional support. 
Results:
We found that women characterized by less traditional values (i.e. high education, non-farming occupation) have less kin and more unrelated friends in their networks, who they rely on for emotional support. Women characterized by traditional rural values rely on genetic kin and affines, for practical and financial support. Importantly, we found trade-offs between types of support across women. 
Conclusions: These shifting networks moderate information transmission and help explain the cultural transmission of low fertility values.

Female friendship and the horizontal transmission of low fertility values

**Author(s):** Lu, Y. T.; Colleran, H. Fertility decline may involve quantity-quality trade-offs among children, and many studies assume this is adaptive via costs and benefits of wealth accumulation and transmission. Few models have explored these hypotheses over the long term. Here we ask: does wealth-stratification generate fertility declines when the marginal costs to reproduction (interpretable as cultural or economic perceptions) differ by class? 

We develop an ABM whereby agents inherit both parental wealth and a resource allocation strategy. They allocate wealth between fertility and inheritance in 1) a setting with density-dependent death and 2) a setting where wealth classes experience differential costs to reproduction. Descendant wealth is determined by the combination of inheritance and a random income contribution from the environment.

Preliminary results show that parents investing more in fertility than bequests leave more descendants over time. This dynamic converges faster in the second setting. Greater stratification also leads upper-class parents to have fewer children than the middle class, consistent with arguments that the wealthiest classes lead the demographic transitions.

We suggest that wealth stratification may be crucial in explaining historical fertility.

The coevolution of human fertility and wealth stratification

 One of the central challenges facing the designers of cultural database projects is that of ontology. What should the units of analysis be? Should multiple units be allowed and, if so, how should they be related? In this talk we will explain how the Database of Religious History (DRH) project has responded to this challenge, explore the advantages and disadvantages of the approach we have adopted, and describe the tension we have confronted between allowing units of analysis to proliferate and maintaining coherence and usability in the database.

The Question of Ontology in Cultural Database Projects

 The Database of Religious History (DRH) consists of a series of polls, including mainly quantitative questions. There are many challenges for the analysis of DRH data—How to select a sample of religious groups? How to handle missing data? How to handle disagreement between experts? In this presentation I will address how these challenges have been managed in recent analysis. In particular I will focus on the challenge of defining a useful data set from the DRH sample to answer specific questions.

Challenges for Quantitative Analyses of History: Examples from the Database of Religious History

**Author(s):** Hagen, RV; Scelza, BA; Barrett, HC Introduction: Patriarchy likely has its roots in an evolutionary history of sexual conflict, but variation in women's interests in gender norms today is often overlooked. We consider whether women themselves can sometimes benefit from unequal gender norms, such as through gains from alliances with high-status men or benefits to male offspring. Also, younger women may experience higher costs than older women. We test whether these hypothesized interests are reflected in stated gender attitudes. Methods: We use survey data from China (n = 4126), Taiwan (2024), Japan (2660) and South Korea (1051) and Bayesian multi-level regression models to test predictions. Findings: In most countries, women’s views grow more patriarchal with age at a rate faster than for men (Taiwan: β = -.07, P(β < 0) = .88, China: β = -.10, P(β < 0) = .99, Japan: β = 0.0, P(β < 0) = .52, S Korea: β = -.06, P(β < 0) = .76), suggesting this is not due to generational norm changes alone. The predicted SES-effect was only found in Taiwan (β = -.28, P(β < 0) = .93). In China (β = -.09, P(β < 0) = .95) and S Korea (β = -. 22, P(β < 0) = .94) a higher ratio of sons to daughters is linked with more unequal gender views, and this is mostly driven by an item representing son preference. Discussion: Some of the variation in people’s attitudes to gender norms may be explained through their varying interests in such norms. The costs women experience from unequal norms likely decrease with age. Having more sons is associated with a stronger son-preference, but does not affect other norms tested in this study.

Understanding women's support for patriarchal gender norms in four East Asian countries

 Why do humans spend valuable resources on mortuary rituals? Evidence from fieldwork in a Romanian village and ethnographic literature suggests that costly signals of generosity activate intuitions about cooperation with the dead represented by an enduring “person-file system” (Boyer 2002). Performers use rituals to increase their reputation as cooperators as well as powerful and wealthy people (Hayden 2009). Family, relatives, friends, and other consociates perceive such investments as mutualistic cooperation (Baumard 2016) calibrated according to partner value. The model explains some recurrent features: fear of ancestor vengeance and peer moralization for ritual omission or underinvestment, the preferential treatment of the dead’s partners, variable but finite timescale of mortuary dues, overinvestment for high-status dead, the irrelevancy of grief, and the role of inheritance. Cultural attraction (Sperber 1996) can explain similarities and variability in ritual expenditure across societies.

Mortuary ritual investment as cues of mutualistic cooperation beyond death

Here we use the tools of behavioural ecology to try and understand the evolution of religious beliefs and practices; specifically our recent studies of the causes and consequences of religious celibacy in Amdo Tibetans (in western PRC). Historically a large number of young boys were sent to live a celibate life in monasteries. We find that this apparently costly practice of sending sons to the monastery, does in fact have kin selected benefits for other family members. We also examine the implication for local sex ratios, and for the workloads of men and women. It appears that ecology and kin selection can underpin apparently costly behaviours, generating gender biased behaviour and even the emergence of religious institutions.

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Persuading the Emperors: A Quantitative Historical Analysis of Political Rhetoric in Traditional China

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