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Published online on February 19, 2008, 10.1073/pnas.0711802105
PNAS | March 4, 2008 | vol. 105 | no. 9 | 3416-3420
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From the Cover
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / EVOLUTION
Natural selection and cultural rates of change

Deborah S. Rogers and Paul R. Ehrlich*

Department of Biological Sciences, Gilbert Building, 371 Serra Mall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

Contributed by Paul R. Ehrlich, December 17, 2007 (received for review November 5, 2007)

It has been claimed that a meaningful theory of cultural evolution is not possible because human beliefs and behaviors do not follow predictable patterns. However, theoretical models of cultural transmission and observations of the development of societies suggest that patterns in cultural evolution do occur. Here, we analyze whether two sets of related cultural traits, one tested against the environment and the other not, evolve at different rates in the same populations. Using functional and symbolic design features for Polynesian canoes, we show that natural selection apparently slows the evolution of functional structures, whereas symbolic designs differentiate more rapidly. This finding indicates that cultural change, like genetic evolution, can follow theoretically derived patterns.

canoe design | cultural evolution | Polynesia | signatures of selection

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.

Author contributions: D.S.R. and P.R.E. designed research; D.S.R. performed research; D.S.R. analyzed data; and D.S.R. and P.R.E. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

See Commentary on page 3175.

This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0711802105/DC1.

{dagger} Lee L (1999) Measures of distributional similarity. 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, College Park, MD), pp 25–32.

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: pre{at}stanford.edu

© 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA


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Related Commentary in PNAS:

Canoes and cultural evolution
Stephen Shennan
PNAS 2008 105: 3175-3176. [Extract] [Full Text]  



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S. Shennan
Canoes and cultural evolution
PNAS, March 4, 2008; 105(9): 3175 - 3176.
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