The evolution of innovation-enhancing institutions

This chapter applies an integrated approach to decision-making and cultural evolution to explore some of the characteristics that influence population-level differences in innovativeness and to understand how such differences emerge. In laying the foundation for subsequent arguments I begin by summarizing research showing how evolutionary theory can direct and inform our understanding of decision-making, social learning and cultural evolution. Then, extending insights from existing cultural evolutionary models, I examine how a population's size and degree of 'cultural interconnectedness' can influence rates of both innovation and invention. A simple model illustrates the relative importance of cultural interconnectedness compared to individual invention. Combining ethno-historical and archaeological cases, I further explore the relative importance of "mother necessity" and "heroic genius" vs. recombination, lucky mistakes, and the accretion of small changes in driving invention. This discussion suggests that, at best, "necessity" is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain invention and that invention processes are dominated by incremental additions, recombinations, and lucky errors, not revolutionary insights. This means that inventiveness is—at least in part—a product of large populations (that generate more lucky errors) and greater interconnectedness that together with population size favors more recombinant inventions, as well as a greater likelihood of these diffusing widely. Lastly, I examine how increasing the interconnectedness in a population gives rise to an n-person cooperative dilemma. While some partial solutions to this dilemma have emerged across our species, only some societies have evolved the informal (and later formal) institutions—i.e., systems of reputation, signaling, and punishment—that favor the wide sharing of information, ideas and insights. Theoretical work has revealed three avenues to solving such n-person cooperative dilemmas, but crucially, all three generate multiple stable equilibria, meaning that while they can stabilize cooperative information sharing, they can also stabilize "information hiding and free-riding" as well as other non-group-beneficial states. In such circumstances, processes of cultural group selection, which operate through various forms of competition among groups, can favor the evolution of those institutional forms that best promote the open dissemination so crucial to innovation. This line of thinking proposes that cultural evolution has favored the emergence of institutions that increase cultural interconnectedness, thereby stimulating both greater inventiveness and more innovation at the population level.