Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative culture

TLDR

Chimpanzee and human cultures share homologous cognitive and learning mechanisms, yet human culture uniquely accumulates modifications over time, a phenomenon termed the ratchet effect. The authors contend that, beyond shared mechanisms, distinct mechanisms also drive human cultural evolution. Chimpanzee cultural traditions arise from population-level behavioural biases within the species’ latent solution space, driven by founder effects, individual learning, and product‑oriented copying, whereas human culture is shaped by process‑oriented social learning, active teaching, conformity incentives, and normative sanctions. These distinct social learning and cooperation processes give rise to humans’ unique cumulative cultural evolution.

Abstract

Some researchers have claimed that chimpanzee and human culture rest on homologous cognitive and learning mechanisms. While clearly there are some homologous mechanisms, we argue here that there are some different mechanisms at work as well. Chimpanzee cultural traditions represent behavioural biases of different populations, all within the species’ existing cognitive repertoire (what we call the ‘zone of latent solutions’) that are generated by founder effects, individual learning and mostly product-oriented (rather than process-oriented) copying. Human culture, in contrast, has the distinctive characteristic that it accumulates modifications over time (what we call the ‘ratchet effect’). This difference results from the facts that (i) human social learning is more oriented towards process than product and (ii) unique forms of human cooperation lead to active teaching, social motivations for conformity and normative sanctions against non-conformity. Together, these unique processes of social learning and cooperation lead to humans’ unique form of cumulative cultural evolution.