Evolved Open-Endedness in Cultural Evolution: A New Dimension in Open-Ended Evolution Research.

The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be." The study and pursuit of open-ended evolution in artificial evolutionary systems exemplify this goal. However, open-ended evolution research is hampered by two fundamental issues: the struggle to replicate open-endedness in an artificial evolutionary system and our assumption that we only have one system (genetic evolution) from which to draw inspiration.

Fidelity, stances, and explaining cultural stability.

The bifocal stance theory posits two stances - the ritual and the instrumental - each a learning strategy with different fidelity outcomes. These differences in turn have long-term consequences for cultural stability. Yet we suggest the key concept of "fidelity" is insufficiently explicated.

Cognitive novelties, informational form, and structural-causal explanations.

Recent work has established a framework for explaining the origin of cognitive novelties-qualitatively distinct cognitive traits-in human beings. This niche construction approach argues that humans engineer epistemic environments in ways that facilitate the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of such novelties. I here argue that attention to the organized relations between content-carrying informational vehicles, or , is key to a valuable explanatory strategy within this project, what I call explanations.

Normativity, social change, and the epistemological framing of culture.

The authors deploy an epistemic framework to represent culture and model the acquisition of cultural behavior. Yet, the framing inherits familiar problems with explaining the acquisition of norms. Such problems are conspicuous with regard to human societies where norms are ubiquitous.

Synthesising arguments and the extended evolutionary synthesis.

Synthesising arguments motivate changes to the conceptual tools, theoretical structure, and evaluatory framework employed in a given scientific domain. Recently, a broad coalition of researchers has put forward a synthesising argument in favour of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis ('EES'). Often this synthesising argument is evaluated using a virtue-based approach, which construes the EES as a wholesale alternative to prevailing practice.

Looking for middle ground in cultural attraction theory.

In their article, Thom Scott-Phillips, Stefaan Blancke, and Christophe Heintz do a commendable job summarizing the position and misunderstandings of "cultural attraction theory" (CAT). However, they do not address a longstanding problem for the CAT framework; that while it has an encompassing theory and some well-worked out case studies, it lacks tools for generating models or empirical hypotheses of intermediate generality. I suggest that what the authors diagnose as misunderstandings are instead superficial interpretive errors, resulting from researchers who have attempted to extract generalizable hypotheses from CAT and bring them into contact with the analytical and inferential models of contemporary cultural evolutionary research.

Domains of generality.

We argue that general intelligence, as presented in the target article, generates multiple distinct and non-equivalent characterisations. Clarifying this central concept is necessary for assessing Burkart et al.'s proposal that the cultural intelligence hypothesis is the best explanation for the evolution of general intelligence.

What are cultural attractors?

Concepts from cultural attractor theory are now used in domains far from their original home in anthropology and cultural evolution. Yet these concepts have not been consistently characterised. I here distinguish four ways in which the cultural attractor concept has been used and identify three kinds of factors of attraction typically appealed to.