The Power of Cultural Evolution

This chapter shows that cultural evolution enables the accumulation of vast amounts of knowledge about the world, much beyond what would be possible for individuals. It emphasizes that the availability of cultural information has momentous consequences for the behavioral and cognitive architecture of individuals and that the presence of culture allows for increased behavioral and mental flexibility. It also considers how cultural evolution can leverage mental mechanisms that are more sophisticated than associative learning to accumulate knowledge about the world. The chapter shows how various learning mechanisms can combine to yield cumulative cultural evolution of behavioral sequences. It sets up a model world that contains many behavioral sequences that can be learned.