INVENTION AND CULTURAL CHANGE

Invention and International Diffusion of Climate Change

Darwinism and cultural change.

Evolutionary models of cultural change have acquired an important role in attempts to explain the course of human evolution, especially our specialization in knowledge-gathering and intelligent control of environments. In both biological and cultural change, different patterns of explanation become relevant at different 'grains' of analysis and in contexts associated with different explanatory ...

Climate-driven technical change: seasonality and the invention of agriculture

During the Neolithic Revolution, seven populations independently invented agriculture. In this paper, I argue that this innovation was a response to a large increase in climatic seasonality. Hunter-gatherers in the most affected regions became sedentary in order to store food and smooth their consumption. I present a model capturing the key incentives for adopting agriculture, and I test the re...

Cultural innovations and demographic change.

Demography plays a large role in cultural evolution through its effects on the effective rate of innovation. If we assume that useful inventions are rare, then small isolated societies will have low rates of invention. In small populations, complex technology will tend to be lost as a result of random loss or incomplete transmission (the Tasmanian effect). Large populations have more inventors ...

Understanding Cultural Persistence and Change

When does culture persist and when does it change? We examine a determinant of extent of cultural persistence that has been put forth in the evolutionary anthropology literature: the stability of the environment. A prediction, which is standard in a variety micro-founded models, is that valuing tradition and placing greater importance on maintaining the customs of the previous generation is rel...