Culture is all around us

The evolution of cultural artifacts:

• Litttle Red Riding Hood
• Witchcraft
• Pasta
• Electronic music
• Dance
• Religion (this is a big one):
  • Medicinal specialists

Culture is embodied

• White sclera to better follow the gaze of others
• Sweating and the evolution of water bottles
• Fire and outsourcing our digest (freeing up our gutz to invest in larger brains)
• Left handedness
• Human visual system being hijacked by literacy Ch. 1 Henrich 2020
• Lactose tolerance (Ch.6 Laland 2017, Gerbaul et al. 2011)

Cultural cognition

• Perception and memory hihacked by WEIRD psychology (cognitive styles; see Smaldino and Richerson 2012)
  • This works on Twitter as well Powell et al. 2023
• Also categorization and social identity (Kallens et al. 2018), e.g.
  • Cars/Latte and political leaning Smaldino et al. 2018
• Language (this is a big one);
  • Language (originally) evolved to reduce the costs, increase the accuracy, and expand the domains of teaching.
  • …

Misc

Of course, cultural evolution itself also evolve:

• The evolution of cultural evolution (Henrich & McElreath 2003)
• The cultural evolution of cultural evolution (Birch & Heyes 2021)