Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Recently there has been a movement in the social sciences to apply theories and methods developed originally in evolutionary biology to understand human behavior and cultural change. In this article, I highlight an ever growing branch of this research that analyzes cultural data using a suite of techniques based on evolutionary trees. These phylogenetic methods fall into two categories: (a) “tree-building” that is, inferring the historical relationships between units, and (b) comparative analyses that is, mapping other traits onto the tips of these trees to make inferences about trait evolution. Using lexical data I infer the phylogenetic relationships between 82 Indo-European languages. The estimated divergence time of these languages agrees with earlier studies in supporting a hypothesis that places the homeland of the Indo-Europeans somewhere in Anatolia 8000-9500 BP. Using data from Austronesian-speaking societies I give examples of the use of comparative methods to (i) infer the system of land tenure in ancestral societies, (ii) examine the ecological correlates of violence in the Polynesian and Micronesian societies, and (iii) test hypotheses about the mode and tempo of sociopolitical evolution. I examine future areas of cultural phylogenetic research in the evolutionary social sciences and argue that the kinds of studies introduced in this article hold the potential for fruitful collaborations between cultural phylogeneticists and cross-cultural researchers.

Anthropologists and archaeologists increasingly use phylogenetic methods to test hypotheses involving cross-cultural traits, but the appropriateness of applying tree-based methods to analyze cultural traits is unclear. The authors developed a spatially explicit computer simulation model to investigate trait evolution in relation to phylogeny and geography and used the simulation to assess the sensitivity of two comparative methods (independent contrasts and partial Mantel tests) to different degrees of horizontal transmission. Simulation results show that (a) the method of independent contrasts is sensitive to even small amounts of horizontal transmission in cultural data sets, (b) Mantel tests fail to cleanly discriminate between datasets characterized by different levels of horizontal and vertical trait transmission, and (c) partial Mantel tests do not produce markedly improved statistical performance when testing for associations among traits (as compared to independent contrasts). The results highlight the need for empirical estimates of horizontal transmission and extinction rates in cross-cultural datasets.