Davison, Dinah R.
Andersson, Claes http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1457-3240
Michod, Richard E. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7782-0379
Kuhn, Steven L.
Funding for this research was provided by:
H2020 Future and Emerging Technologies (732942)
Chalmers University of Technology
Article History
Received: 12 November 2020
Accepted: 19 April 2021
First Online: 6 July 2021
Glossary
:
: Patterns of thinking and behavior (e.g., food preferences, foraging strategies, tools, social customs, etc.) that persist across generations due to social learning. Widespread among animals, traditions are foremostly adapted by creative problem solving, but with a potential for limited Darwinian selection arising from repeated cycles of learning and application of variant instances held by different learners.
: Human cultural systems cannot generally be resolved into identifiable discrete traditions. To denote the parts of cultural systems more generally we speak instead of cultural components. For particularly large and integrated cultural components we speak of institutions.
: We reserve the term culture for integrated and adapted systems of cultural components (originally traditions.) Only the genus <i>Homo</i> supports culture in this view, and “an animal culture” is simply a collection of stand-alone traditions without significant interactions between them (see also GalefCitationRef removed; Read and Andersson 2019).
: A system of independent features of social group behavior and learning that together creates (as a side effect) a potential for sets of animal traditions to be selected together. Like the biological protocell – which plays a key role in the origin of cellular life – it imparts essential meta-evolutionary functions (reproduction, heredity, and containment) to a potential future group-level evolutionary individual.
: An evolutionary individual is an integrated higher-level unit of selection and adaptation in which selection of lower levels components is restricted. For instance, the multicellular organism is an individual as selection at the lower level of the cell is restricted.
: The SPH proposes that groups of tradition evolved into a new kind of group-level cultural entity, termed a sociont, comprised of integrated cultural components (i.e., institutions.) The potential that evolving institutions may improve the efficiency of meta-evolutionary functions is the evolution of evolutionary individuality that we investigate in this paper.
: A social community of animals (in practice <i>Homo</i>) whose behaviors are largely governed by a cultural system that they enact, maintain, and transmit. Following the proposition by Andersson and Törnberg (2019), it is seen here as an obligate mutualistic partnership between <i>Homo</i> and sociont.
: Groups of individuals become a new kind of individual. In an ETI, formerly independent lower-level evolutionary individuals are integrated into a new group-level evolutionary individual. The lower-level entities cease, wholly or partly, to be evolutionary individuals in their own right – such as cells in a multicellular organism or organelles (e.g., mitochondria) in eukaryotic cells.