Collaborative Research: Multi-Ancestor Coalescent Theory For Cultural Evolution

喜好、时尚和语言都会随着时间的推移而变化。这种文化从哪里来，往哪里去，是一个长期存在的科学和哲学争论的话题，也是一个持续吸引人的大众猜测的话题。在过去的半个世纪里，人口遗传学家揭示了人类物种的许多遗传史，产生了一个关于我们迁徙和关联的故事，重振了人类学、考古学和民族学。文化的故事有时符合基因的故事，但有时与之相矛盾，总是变化得更快。这个项目从种群遗传学中获得了核心见解，特别是融合理论，该理论及时向后探索谱系，看看它们是如何汇聚或融合成共同的祖先的，并将这些见解应用于文化研究。通过数学理论和经验数据，该项目旨在将融合作为理解文化历史的中心工具。这将为解决长期存在的问题铺平道路，这些问题涉及文化变化和差异的速度和时机、不同文化之间的接触程度，甚至这些变化背后的机制。在这些问题上的进展测试将在鸟鸣(研究最好的非人类文化范例)和人类语言上进行。这项工作将由一个学术和种族多元化的科学家团队进行，其中包括进化生物学、人类学、数学和文化变革方面的专家。

Preferences, fashions, and languages change through time. Where this culture comes from and where it is going is a perennial subject of scientific and philosophical debate and a continually fascinating topic of popular speculation. In the last half century, population geneticists have revealed much of the genetic history of the human species, yielding a story of our migration and relatedness that has revitalized anthropology, archeology, and ethnology. The story of culture sometimes fits the story of the genes, but sometimes contradicts it and always changes more quickly. This project takes central insights from population genetics, especially coalescent theory that explores lineages backwards in time to see how they converge or coalesce into common ancestors, and appropriates these insights to a study of culture. Through both mathematical theory and empirical data, this project aims to implement coalescence as a central tool by which to understand the history of culture. This will pave the way for solutions to persistent questions relating to the speed and timing of cultural change and divergence, the degree of contact between cultures, and even the mechanisms behind these changes. Tests of progress on these questions will be conducted on bird song (the best studied nonhuman example of culture) as well as human language. This work will be conducted by an academically and ethnically diverse team of scientists including specialists in evolutionary biology, anthropology, mathematics, and cultural change.