Cultural attraction theory (CAT) is a research agenda the purpose of which is to develop
causal explanations of cultural phenomena. CAT is also an evolutionary approach to culture …

Abstract 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 …

High-fidelity cultural transmission, rather than brute intelligence, is the secret of our species'
success, or so many cultural evolutionists claim. It has been selected because it ensures the …

The state of the art of the debate between externalist and internalist concepts of language is
reviewed in this paper, and a new conceptualization of language as a “developmental …

Cumulative cultural evolution is often claimed to be distinctive of human culture. Such claims
are typically supported with examples of complex and historically late‐appearing …

A leading idea of cultural evolutionary theory is that for human cultures to undergo
evolutionary change, cultural transmission must generally serve as a high-fidelity copying …

The cultural transmission of technical know-how has proven vital to the success of our
species. The broad diversity of learning contexts and social configurations, as well as the …

Cultural evolutionists typically emphasize the informational aspect of social transmission,
that of the learning, stabilizing, and transformation of mental representations along cultural …

The cumulative open-endedness of human cultures represents a major break with the social
traditions of nonhuman species. As traditions are altered and the modifications retained …

Observed similarities in two distinct technological traditions can be attributable to different
causes. The similarities could have been inherited from a common ancestral tradition, in …