Vaesen, Krist and Houkes, Wybo (2017) Complexity and technological evolution: what everybody knows? [Preprint]
Text
000_FINAL_draft.docx Download (7MB) |
Abstract
The consensus among cultural evolutionists seems to be that human cultural evolution is cumulative, which is commonly understood in the specific sense that cultural traits, especially technological traits, increase in complexity over generations. Here we argue that there is insufficient credible evidence in favor of or against this technological complexity thesis. For one thing, the few datasets that are available hardly constitute a representative sample. For another, they substantiate very specific, and usually different versions of the complexity thesis or, even worse, do not point to complexity increases. We highlight the problems our findings raise for current work in cultural-evolutionary theory, and present various suggestions for future research.
Export/Citation: | EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL |
Social Networking: |
Item Type: | Preprint | |||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Creators: |
|
|||||||||
Keywords: | cultural evolution; cultural-evolutionary theory; cumulative culture; complexity; technology | |||||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Anthropology Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory General Issues > Technology |
|||||||||
Depositing User: | Dr Krist Vaesen | |||||||||
Date Deposited: | 01 Nov 2017 16:00 | |||||||||
Last Modified: | 01 Nov 2017 16:00 | |||||||||
Item ID: | 14083 | |||||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Anthropology Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory General Issues > Technology |
|||||||||
Date: | 2017 | |||||||||
URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/14083 |
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Actions (login required)
View Item |