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From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?”
Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information” (Laland and Hoppitt, 2003, p. 151). Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals (Dean et al., 2014) it is...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864182/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35222132 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.663397 |
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author | Sinclair, Natalie C. Ursell, James South, Alex Rendell, Luke |
author_facet | Sinclair, Natalie C. Ursell, James South, Alex Rendell, Luke |
author_sort | Sinclair, Natalie C. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information” (Laland and Hoppitt, 2003, p. 151). Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals (Dean et al., 2014) it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds (Rendell and Whitehead, 2001; Aplin, 2019; Whiten, 2021). More recently, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has taken on this distinguishing role (Henrich, 2015; Laland, 2018). CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” (Tomasello, 1994) gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual (Sasaki and Biro, 2017). Mesoudi and Thornton (2018) define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-human animals that places emphasis on some performance measure of traits increasing over time. They suggest this emphasis is also pertinent to cultural products in the aesthetic domain, but is this the case? Music, art and dance evolve over time (Savage, 2019), but can we say they gain beneficial modifications that increase their aesthetic value? Here we bring together perspectives from philosophy, musicology and biology to build a conceptual analysis of this question. We summarise current thinking on cumulative culture and aesthetics across fields to determine how aesthetic culture fits into the concept of CCE. We argue that this concept is problematic to reconcile with dominant views of aesthetics in philosophical analysis and struggles to characterise aesthetic cultures that evolve over time. We suggest that a tension arises from fundamental differences between cultural evolution in aesthetic and technological domains. Furthermore, this tension contributes to current debates between reconstructive and preservative theories of cultural evolution. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8864182 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-88641822022-02-24 From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?” Sinclair, Natalie C. Ursell, James South, Alex Rendell, Luke Front Psychol Psychology Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information” (Laland and Hoppitt, 2003, p. 151). Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals (Dean et al., 2014) it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds (Rendell and Whitehead, 2001; Aplin, 2019; Whiten, 2021). More recently, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has taken on this distinguishing role (Henrich, 2015; Laland, 2018). CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” (Tomasello, 1994) gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual (Sasaki and Biro, 2017). Mesoudi and Thornton (2018) define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-human animals that places emphasis on some performance measure of traits increasing over time. They suggest this emphasis is also pertinent to cultural products in the aesthetic domain, but is this the case? Music, art and dance evolve over time (Savage, 2019), but can we say they gain beneficial modifications that increase their aesthetic value? Here we bring together perspectives from philosophy, musicology and biology to build a conceptual analysis of this question. We summarise current thinking on cumulative culture and aesthetics across fields to determine how aesthetic culture fits into the concept of CCE. We argue that this concept is problematic to reconcile with dominant views of aesthetics in philosophical analysis and struggles to characterise aesthetic cultures that evolve over time. We suggest that a tension arises from fundamental differences between cultural evolution in aesthetic and technological domains. Furthermore, this tension contributes to current debates between reconstructive and preservative theories of cultural evolution. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-02-09 /pmc/articles/PMC8864182/ /pubmed/35222132 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.663397 Text en Copyright © 2022 Sinclair, Ursell, South and Rendell. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Sinclair, Natalie C. Ursell, James South, Alex Rendell, Luke From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?” |
title | From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?” |
title_full | From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?” |
title_fullStr | From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?” |
title_full_unstemmed | From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?” |
title_short | From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to “Cumulative Cultural Evolution?” |
title_sort | from beethoven to beyoncé: do changing aesthetic cultures amount to “cumulative cultural evolution?” |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864182/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35222132 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.663397 |
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