Divergent cumulative cultural evolution occurs when the cultural evolutionary trajectory diverges from the biological evolutionary trajectory. We consider the conditions under which divergent cumulative cultural evolution can occur. We hypothesize that two conditions are necessary. First that genetic and cultural information are stored separately in the agent. Second cultural information must be transferred horizontally between agents of different generations. We implement a model with these properties and show evidence of divergent cultural evolution under both cooperative and competitive selection pressures.

This content is only available as a PDF.
© 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2016
MIT Press
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.