Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 365, Issue 1559, Pages 3865-3874Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0020
Keywords
cultural phylogenies; population history; coevolution; cophylogeny; cultural evolution; Iranian tribes
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Funding
- Economic and Social Research Council
- Arts and Humanities Research Council
- Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
- Research Councils UK
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
- Canada Research Chairs Program
- Canada Foundation for Innovation
- British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund
- Simon Fraser University
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Phylogenetic approaches to culture have shed new light on the role played by population dispersals in the spread and diversification of cultural traditions. However, the fact that cultural inheritance is based on separate mechanisms from genetic inheritance means that socially transmitted traditions have the potential to diverge from population histories. Here, we suggest that associations between these two systems can be reconstructed using techniques developed to study cospeciation between hosts and parasites and related problems in biology. Relationships among the latter are patterned by four main processes: co-divergence, intra-host speciation ( duplication), intra-host extinction ( sorting) and horizontal transfers. We show that patterns of cultural inheritance are structured by analogous processes, and then demonstrate the applicability of the host-parasite model to culture using empirical data on Iranian tribal populations.
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