Highlights•Other species create but we alone exhibit cumulative open-ended cultural
evolution.•A theory of cultural evolution could provide a unifying framework for the social …

Of paramount importance to the natural sciences, the principles of Darwinism, which involve
variation, inheritance, and selection, are increasingly of interest to social scientists as well …

Dawkinsʼ replicator-based conception of evolution has led to widespread mis-application of
selectionism across the social sciences because it does not address the paradox that …

Archaeologists are adept at analyzing variation in artifacts. The discipline has well
established and tested methods to track change through time and to evaluate the function of …

Cultural transmission (CT) is implicit in many explanations of culture change. Formal CT
models were defined by anthropologists 30 years ago and have been a subject of active …

Like that early evolutionary theory (though unlike Darwin himself), much work in literary
adaptation today thinks only in terms of higher and lower forms, that is, considering …

The origin of our capacity for language is a complex topic, requiring input from many
disparate fields, from linguistics to paleoanthropology. Specialists in any one field are often …

A simple model of random copying among individuals, similar to the population genetic
model of random drift, can predict the variability in the popularity of cultural variants. Here …

Many species engage in acts that could be called creative (JC Kaufman & AB Kaufman,
2004). However, human creativity is unique in that it has completely transformed the planet …

This paper proposes a theory of creativity, referred to as honing theory, which posits that
creativity fuels the process by which culture evolves through communal exchange amongst …