Language and cultural evolution

The paper uses phylogenetic comparative methods to analyze syllable complexity across 5 language families, finding lineage-specific factors drive variation more than universal biomechanical biases.

This paper analyzes 13,415 SNVs in 33 language/cognition genes across species to identify evolutionary breakpoints and assess gene enrichment, finding language and cognition genes are not separable modules but part of an integrated system.

This study compares evolutionary rescue probabilities through biological and cultural evolution using a stochastic model, showing that transmission biases significantly affect rescue outcomes.

The paper models how age-biased social learning evolves in structured populations, showing that individuals shift from learning from peers to elders as they age due to trade-offs between knowledge and accessibility.

This study examines how social network structure influences cumulative cultural evolution under different transmission biases and finds that network effects depend strongly on the type of bias.

This study extends an eco-cultural model to analyze how spatial bottlenecks affect cultural and ecological spread, finding that cultural waves can be blocked by narrow corridors while ecological waves are unaffected.

This study shows gene-culture coevolution can enable tradition formation in mate choice without requiring conformist social learning, by leveraging frequency-dependent interactions between preferences and traits.

This study tests whether writing affects language evolution and use, finding no significant impact on hierarchy depth, sentence length, or clause combining in 30 and 59 languages.

The paper uses phylogenetic modeling to show that languages tend to minimize syntactic hierarchy in grammar, with cultural variation, likely due to learning costs.

The paper shows that iterated learning leads semantic systems to approach optimal lossy compression of meaning, suggesting a cognitive bias toward efficient representation.

This study uses agent-based models to show that childhood exploration enhances cultural adaptation and long childhood evolution by enabling broader learning before exploitation.

This study combines genetic data and mythological motifs to show that population movements and cultural diffusion shaped the distribution of myths globally, with evidence dating back to 38,000 years ago.

This paper presents a mathematical model showing that Lamarckian and Weismannian inheritance form a continuum, allowing cultural replication to approximate genetic replication fidelity.

The paper compares mental trait evolution between modern humans and Neanderthals, finding suppression of neuroticism and increased learning in humans, and greater intelligence evolution in Neanderthals.

The paper compares language gene polymorphism patterns between humans and chimpanzee-like primates, finding distinct SNPs and clustering differences.

This study uses online iterated singing experiments to show that cognitive and motor constraints shape melodic structure through oral transmission.

The paper introduces a method to quantify hierarchical structure in human behaviors and applies it to analyze the complexity of stone tool-making sequences across different time periods.