Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Over the last 30 years, the idea that the processes producing cultural stability and change are analogous in important respects to those of biological evolution has become increasingly popular. Biological evolution is characterized by changing frequencies of genes in populations through time as a result of such processes as natural selection; likewise, cultural evolution refers to the changing distributions of cultural attributes in populations, which are affected by processes such as natural selection but also by others that have no analogue in genetic evolution. The fundamental, mathematically based theory that justified and spelled out the necessary modifications to standard population genetics theory to make it relevant to culture was laid out by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1) and Boyd and Richerson (2) in the 1980s, on the basis of earlier papers, and Richard Dawkins (3) had already introduced the idea to the popular imagination with his concept of the meme as analogous to the gene. In the intervening period, the development of what has come to be called dual inheritance theory or gene ``culture coevolution theory has continued, and it has been accompanied by a slowly growing number of empirical case studies that apply these ideas to understanding patterned variation in cultural data. The article by Rogers and Ehrlich (4) in this issue of PNAS makes a significant contribution to this growing field by showing how different cultural evolutionary processes can be identified and distinguished from one another and how they differentially affect different kinds of cultural traits; it will certainly become a widely cited classic case study, and the dataset of descriptive traits of canoes from different Polynesian groups is likely to become a test bed for future cultural evolutionary studies.