The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms

by R. Alexander Bentley, Michael J. O'Brien

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.

Genres: Cultural

176 pages, Hardcover

Published August 25, 2017

Reviews

[Ryan Chynces · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had such high hopes for this book but I alternate Lee found it uneven, lacking cohesion, and ultimately unengaging.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like another reviewer, I also had high hopes for this book. I expected it to be a popular overview rather than a new synthesis, or an argument, or an academic discussion, so I don't think it was the case that I expected too much from it. I knew what it was. I had even hoped that it might be the kind of book that would be useful for teaching, as an introduction to current trends in the study of cultural evolution. And, it is that....kind of...but, it is not pedagogically useful or particularly informative, in my estimation. Each topic is covered so fleetingly that a student or someone trying to learn about the topic is simply racing past important concepts that are treated in a paragraph before moving on to something else briefly, etc. In other words, it just comes off as a succession of snapshots that never really cohere or even stick with you because you're constantly moving on to something else. In that regard, it is not useful for a newcomer and is offers nothing new for anyone already familiar with the field, so it's not clear who the audience is. Perhaps the most useful chapter is the one on 'Bayesians' which is focused, clear, and memorable enough to actually get across this important and central idea to an uninformed audience. I couldn't really recommend this to anybody, though, even though it is a quick and easy read. It just doesn't accomplish enough. In trying to be accessible, it has pared its coverage of each topic down too far.