What Misspellings Reveal About Cultural Evolution
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Highlights
- In other words, I start with an assumption that cultural evolution follows different paths than biological evolution. Stable cultural forms do not have to result from close replication; they can emerge continuously out of subtle changes.
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As fallible as human transmission can be, the fact that our mistakes in transmitting cultural information occur in systematic and directed ways, rather than purely randomly, is opening a new pathway to understanding continuity and change within the field of cultural evolution.