It's more helpful to view cultural transmission and evolution not as natural selection that affects adaptation of humans to their environment, but instead as the spread of contagious diseases among a host population. The idea goes back awhile, at least to the late '60s, and there's a fair amount of good data showing this. Usually the model is some variation on the theme of S-I-R models of disease.

This accounts for why some aspects of culture don't serve any adaptive purpose in humans, or may affect us negatively, while other aspects might help us. Germs can be good, bad, or neutral to our fitness. In the case of functional parts of boat design, we could say that these were under tighter functional constraint of the culture-germ -- to spread throughout most of the host population, it has to obey constraints just as much as a germ that worms its way through the gastrointestinal tract in order to get to the liver or kidney or something.

You can also look at it as a learning curve in a community of skilled craftsmen. Boatbuilders and navigators were the most highly honored men in these societies, and they had a lot of autonomy in a tightly knit tribal society where most were closely restricted by kinship and ritual obligations.

In a way I think you have this backward. One problem of evolutions has been "Why do organisms seem as though they were designed, even though they were not?" But the boats were designed, and it's quite possible that changes in design were deliberate experiments that proved successful. (Many pre-modern peoples were technically rational and highly skilled on topics of concern to them -- Eskimos in many ways, Mongols on warfare, horses, and cold-weather survival).

Conceptualizing evolution as a learning curve can be illuminating, just as conceptualizing learning as eveolution might be. Donald Campbell's "Evolutionary Epistemology" develops "blind variation and selective retention" into many different fields. I think that it can be developed into a very general principle.

Ev epist

Campbell

Ev Epist II

For some reason, you keep not mentioning what I think is the most important recent development in this phenomenon: the replacement of the supernatural with the political. If this isn't a functional mutation, I don't know what the heck is.

I mean, dear god, look at Obama. Could it be more blatant?

mencius, i'm sorry that i don't anticipate your genius!

It's more helpful to view cultural transmission and evolution not as natural selection that affects adaptation of humans to their environment, but instead as the spread of contagious diseases among a host population. The idea goes back awhile, at least to the late '60s, and there's a fair amount of good data showing this. Usually the model is some variation on the theme of S-I-R models of disease.

sperberesque epidemiology of ideas?

Mencius, come on. That's a meme, in the contemporary sense of "something dumb that proliferates virally".

I haven't read Sperber on the epidemiology of ideas, but Bartholomew wrote about SIR models of culture (really "spread of information," but that's the same) in his book on stochastic models in culture in the late '60s. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman bring up SIR models in their culture book, but don't really go anywhere with it. A group including Boyd and Richerson have developed a model called something like "random copying" that is equivalent to an epidemic disease model, and Watts &...someone developed a social contagion model in J of Theoret Bio a few years ago.

What I object to with the epidemic disease model, and to an extent the evolutionary model, is that it excludes the active learning involved in the case in question. Social science has a tendency to want to make people into objects (patients) rather than subjects (agents), and sometimes that's the way to go, but in this case I think that active experimentation and testing by conscious agents is an important factor. That doesn't necessarily mean that epidemiological or evolutionary models are completely irrelevant, but I'd guess is that the frequency and viability of mutations is increased by the conscious creative factor.

assman, yeah, i know a lot of those workers (i know boyd & rich's and cavalli-sforza & feldman's books). the sort of functionalism referred to here seems like a subset of the epidemiological models which are adapting in large part to human psychology and sociology. i'm generally skeptical of functional adaptations to exogenous parameters. e.g., hindus are vegetarian because eating meat is not efficient in terms of maximizing the utilization of agricultural resources. but it doesn't seem like all these examples would be false. since i think i that these adaptations to exogenous parameters are a relatively small number (with many variations on a few common themes) it might be best to start from them and work background (assume other aspects of culture are epidemiological and evoked).

but in this case I think that active experimentation and testing by conscious agents is an important factor.

right, but cognitive science tells us that we're biased in terms of what and how quickly we can learn something. from what i remember that's worked into some of the models.

But canoe-making an apprenticeship system, and the apprentices were basically being trained, rather than deciding what they thought, or happening to pick something up that was in the air. The successful builders would presumably have more apprentices, and if they were successful because of a deliberate innovation, the innovation would be passed on.

john, check out some of joe henrich's work....
http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich...nrich/ home.html

covers the type of stuff you're talking about.

The paper itself seems interesting but the discussion in the news article reminded me of some of the papers coming out of, say, the Santa Fe Institute in the 90s during the complex systems and game theory fad.

The paper itself seems interesting but the discussion in the news article reminded me of some of the papers coming out of, say, the Santa Fe Institute in the 90s during the complex systems and game theory fad.

yeah. i'm definitely going to look at the paper closely. unfortunately the science of culture is mostly about false positives....

The trouble is that when you're doing epidemiology, you look at the actual channels through which the pest travels. Eg, bathhouses for HIV, or whatever.

But when people talk about religious and political memes, they tend to assume the ideas are just wafting through the air in an unstructured, diffuse "marketplace." Au contraire. To paraphrase Richard Weaver: ideas have bathhouses.

In fact, I think we're in one right now...