Articulating Babel: An approach to cultural evolution

• Culture is structured by the articulation of complex sequentially acquired skills.
• Complex skills have dependencies, with later capacities presupposing earlier ones.
• Differential dependencies induce differential rates of evolutionary change.
• Cultural evolution requires also institutions, organizations, and technologies.
• These and skill-specific differential diffusion induce cultural population structure.

After an initial discussion of the character of interdisciplinary linkages between complex disciplines, I consider an area with confluences of many diverse disciplines—the study of cultural evolution. This must embrace not only the traditional biological sciences, but also the multiple often warring disciplines of the human sciences. This interdisciplinary articulation is in its early stages compared, e.g., to that of evolutionary biology or evolutionary developmental biology, and I try to lay out major axes along which its articulation should plausibly occur, given the relevant causal processes acting at different levels. One cannot have an adequate account of cultural evolution without recognizing a central role for cognitive and social development (since culture is cumulatively acquired by individuals through the life-cycle) and the social and cultural organizations and institutions and artifactual tools and infrastructure that support and structure these developmental processes. These induce a population structure that mediates the transmission, expression, and elaboration of culture, and in particular the different ways in which they scaffold learning and the development and articulation of complex skills. I consider how these elements should articulate the disciplines that tend to focus separately on them. Intentions and the market are not explicitly included in this account, and I consider ways in which these perspectives might enter.