Demography and cultural evolution: How adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses - The Tasmanian case
Demography and cultural evolution: How adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses - The Tasmanian case
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DOI：
10.2307/4128416
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发表时间：
2004-04-01
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
Henrich, J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Henrich, J
考古学和民族历史学证据表明，从全新世开始到欧洲探险家在18世纪开始抵达，在大约8,000年的时间里，塔斯马尼亚社会失去了一系列宝贵的技能和技术。这些可能包括骨头工具，寒冷天气的衣服，有柄工具，网，鱼叉，有刺的长矛，矛投掷器和回飞镖。为了解决这一难题，以及更普遍的问题，即人类认知和社会互动如何产生适应性文化进化和文化习得技能的适应不良损失，本文构建了一个正式的文化进化模型，该模型植根于人类社会学习和推理的认知细节。分析结果说明了适应性文化进化速率不同的条件。并揭示制度，它会产生适应不良的损失，特定种类的技能和相关技术。更具体地说。结果表明，有效种群规模的相对突然减少最后一个冰河时代末期，随着海平面上升，塔斯马尼亚岛与澳大利亚其他地区在随后的几千年中被切断，这可能引发了一个文化进化过程，（1）保持稳定，甚至改善了相对简单的技术技能，（2）导致更复杂的技能日益退化，导致一些技术和实践完全消失。这种模式与塔斯马尼亚的经验记录一致。除了这种情况下，我推测模型的适用性，以了解适应性文化进化的速度的可变性。
A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately 8,000-year period,from the beginning of the Holocene until European explorers began arriving in the eighteenth century, the societies of Tasmania lost a series of valuable skills and technologies. These likely included bone tools, cold-weather clothing, hafted tools, nets, fishing spears, barbed spears, spear-throwers, and boomerangs. To address this puzzle, and the more general question of how human cognition and social interaction can generate both adaptive cultural evolution and maladaptive losses of cul-turally acquired skills, this paper constructs a formal model of cultural evolution rooted in the cognitive details of human social learning and inference. The analytical results specify the conditions for differing rates of adaptive cultural evolution. and reveal regimes that it-ill produce maladaptive losses of particular kinds of skills and related technologies. More specifically. the results suggest that the relatively sudden reduction in the effective population size (the size of the interact-ing pool of social learners) that occurred with the rising ocean levels at the end of the last glacial epoch, which cut Tas-mania off from the rest of Australia for the ensuing tea millennia, could have initiated a cultural evolutionary process that (1) kept stable or even improved relatively simple technological skills, and (2) produced an increasing deterioration of more complex skills leading to the complete disappearance of some technologies and practices. This pattern is consistent with the empirical record in Tasmania. Beyond this case, I speculate on the applicability of the model to understanding the vari-ability in rates of adaptive cultural evolution.