The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms

by R. Alexander Bentley, Michael J. O'Brien, John Maeda (Foreword by)

Overview

How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors.

From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves.

Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution.

Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262551977
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	05/21/2024
Series:	Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

R. Alexander Bentley is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee and coauthor of I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping Social Behavior and The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (both published by the MIT Press).

Michael J. O'Brien is Provost and Professor of History at Texas A&M University–San Antonio and the coauthor of I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping Social Behavior and The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (both published by the MIT Press).

An internationally recognized leader at the intersection of design and technology, John Maeda is Executive Vice President/Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient. He was the 16th President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He is the author of Design by Numbers, The Laws of Simplicity, and Redesigning Leadership, all published by The MIT Press.

Table of Contents

Foreword John Maeda vii

Preface: In the Middleton Theater xi

1 Traditional Minds 1

Producers and Scroungers 6

Cultural Intelligence 9

What's in a Name? 12

2 Change is Not Norman 15

Serious Partying 20

Family Feuds 22

3 Check the Transmission 25

Transmission Experiments 28

Cultural Attractors 29

Social Information Bias 32

Slicing and Dicing in the Digital Age 35

4 Cultural Trees 39

The Acheulean Hand Ax 40

Emulation versus Imitation 43

Evolutionary Trees 45

Languages and Folktales 46

Complex Technology 48

5 Bayesians 51

The Bayesian Mind 53

Bayesian Modeling and the Bantu Expansion 55

Across the Pacific 61

6 Traditions and Horizons 67

Diet 70

Gender Relations 73

Charitable Giving 77

7 Networks 81

E-Networks 84

Influence versus Homophily 90

8 Hindsighted 93

Predicting the Past 95

Predicting the Game in Real Time 97

Understanding Collective Behavior 99

9 Moore is Better? 103

The Tasmania Hypothesis 105

An information Explosion 108

The Explosion Hits Science 110

Without Selection 113

10 Free Willy 115

Bluefins and Herring 117

Orcas 120

Along Come Mice 126

Bibliography 129

Index 151

What People are Saying About This

Nick Chater

An entertaining and thought-provoking analysis of the nature of cultural change and how that nature is being transformed, for good or ill, in our ever-more-connected world. A fresh look at our past, and a tantalizing glimpse of our future.

Eric Beinhocker

Much of our world is a product of our collective imagination—what we call culture. Understanding cultural evolution is the key to understanding economic, social, and technological evolution. The Acceleration of Cultural Change provides a fascinating, insightful, and engaging account that takes readers from the Stone Age to the Social Media Age.

Endorsement

Much of our world is a product of our collective imagination—what we call culture. Understanding cultural evolution is the key to understanding economic, social, and technological evolution. The Acceleration of Cultural Change provides a fascinating, insightful, and engaging account that takes readers from the Stone Age to the Social Media Age.

—Eric Beinhocker, Executive Director, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford; author of The Origin of Wealth

From the Publisher

An entertaining and thought-provoking analysis of the nature of cultural change and how that nature is being transformed, for good or ill, in our ever-more-connected world. A fresh look at our past, and a tantalizing glimpse of our future.

—Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School; coauthor of Creating Language

Much of our world is a product of our collective imagination—what we call culture. Understanding cultural evolution is the key to understanding economic, social, and technological evolution. The Acceleration of Cultural Change provides a fascinating, insightful, and engaging account that takes readers from the Stone Age to the Social Media Age.

—Eric Beinhocker, Executive Director, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford; author of The Origin of Wealth