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CES Teaching & Online Materials

Cultural Evolution Society Teaching Materials Library

To enhance the transmission of the science of cultural evolution, the Cultural Evolution Society has established the Teaching Materials Library: an open-source permanent repository of peer-reviewed and award winning cultural evolution teaching materials collected from our curricular awards program.

The library includes:
– 14 open-source courses, at the graduate and undergraduate levels
– free for adoption and modification
– downloadable and editable course materials, including: syllabus, lecture slides, assessments, and activities
– in disciplines such as: Anthropology, Economics, and Psychology
– on topics including: social complexity, music, racism, environmental behavior, kinship, and animal culture
– sourced from: Course Design Award competition, and include all award winning courses, special collections and honorable mentions.
– created by: leading cultural evolution scholars in the UK, US, Germany, Italy, Argentina in universities such as Stanford, Durham, St. Andrews, U.C. Davis.
– includes: authors, institution, course level, hrs of CE content, reviewer comments
– formats: PPTX, KEY, PDF, XLSX, CSV, DOCX

Cultural Evolution Society Online Learning Series

These online modules present many basic and applied issues in cultural evolution and introduce students to methods of dynamical systems theory as applied to the evolution of human systems. Without the aid of mathematical models, human intuitions about dynamic systems of any complexity can be quite faulty. The materials have been developed with self-guided study in mind. Through a variety of online learning methods, students will be able to independently work through the material to gain both a theoretical understanding of the method and practical experience doing it.

The series includes:
– Models of Social Dynamics (Paul Smaldino)
– Animal Cultures (Andrew Whiten, Lucy Aplin, Nicolas Claidiere, Rachel Kendal)
– The Neverending Story (Joseph Stubbersfield, Jamie Tehrani, Oleg Sobchuk)
– Foundations of Cultural Evolution (Adrian Bell)
– Modeling the Dynamics of Cultural Diversification (Bernard Koch, Erik Gjesfjeld)
– Dynamic Models of Human Systems (Russell Genet, Peter Richerson, Cheryl Genet & Charles Efferson)

Our online channels

Find talks and interviews with CES members on our YouTube channel.

Keep updated on Bluesky and Instagram

Talks

Introductions to cultural evolution / general talks

Joseph Henrich “The Secret of our Success”, Talks at Google

Robert Boyd, “How Culture Shaped Human Evolution”, IAST Distinguished Lectures in the Social Sciences

Kevin Laland – The Evolution of Culture

Simon Kirby, “The Language Organism: Evolution, Culture, and What it Means to be Human”, University of Edinburgh

Michael Muthukrishna: Cultural Evolutionary Psychology – HBES Plenary 2021

Short videos (<15 mins):

Joe Henrich: Cultural Evolution and Dual Inheritance

Daniel Dennett: Memes 101 | How Cultural Evolution Works | Big Think

Seminar series

Dysoc/NIMBioS Webinar Series on Cultural Evolution (see the associated tutorials in the Online tutorials and courses section below)

Evolutionary Approaches to Culture conference (Institute of Advanced Studies, Sao Paulo University, Brazil, CES workshop funded)
Part 1 featuring Edu Ottoni, Andy Whiten, Christine Caldwell
Part 2 featuring Cristine Legare & Rachel Kendal

Roundtable discussion on “The Generalised Theory of Evolution” with Daniel Dennett, Eva Jablonka, Alex Mesoudi, Brian Skyrms and Gerhard Schurz, University of Dusseldorf

Extension of Biology Through Culture series, Arthur Sackler Colloquium (Alison Gopnik, Elli Leadbeater, Hal Whitehead, Kevin Laland, Russell Gray, Paul Harris, Arnon Lotem, Christine Legare, Alex Mesoudi, Dorothy Fragaszy, Dietrich Stout, Susan Perry, Andrew Whiten)

The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines (Royal Society scientific discussion meeting organised in partnership with the British Academy by Andrew Whiten, Ellen Garland, Dora Biro and Simon Kirby.

Advanced research talks

Talks from the 2024 Cultural Evolution Society Conference and the follow-up capstone conference can be seen found below. While conference registrants have access to all uploaded talks, a large subset of them are open to the public.

• CES: public , conference registrants

• Transformation Fund Capstone: public, conference registrants

Some professional research talks of general interest are listed below, but feel free to get in touch to recommend others.

Books

Simulation Models of Cultural Evolution in R (Alex Mesoudi)

This tutorial shows how to create very simple simulation or agent-based models of cultural evolution in R, including unbiased and biased transmission, unbiased and biased mutation, migration, blending inheritance, polarisation, cultural group selection, social networks, iterated learning, reinforcement learning and the evolution of social learning.

Individual-based models of cultural evolution: A step-by-step guide using R (Alberto Acerbi, Alex Mesoudi & Marco Smolla)

The field of cultural evolution has emerged in the last few decades as a thriving, interdisciplinary effort to understand cultural change and cultural diversity within an evolutionary framework and using evolutionary tools, concepts and methods. Given its roots in evolutionary biology, much of cultural evolution is grounded in, or inspired by, formal models. Yet many researchers interested in cultural evolution come from backgrounds that lack training in formal models, such as psychology, anthropology or archaeology. This book aims to partly address this gap by showing readers how to create individual-based models (IBMs, also known as agent-based models, or ABMs) of cultural evolution.

Computational Modeling of Social Behavior (Paul Smaldino)

In this graduate-level workshop, students will learn about agent-based modeling and how it is applied to study social phenomena in human and animal societies. Agent-based models are widely used to help us understand a wide range of topics, including but not limited to cooperation, social learning, collective problem solving, opinion dynamics and polarization, segregation, the spread of disease, and the emergence of social norms. Students will receive introductions to relevant formal theories in the life and social sciences, and get hands on experience writing and analyzing simulation models using NetLogo, a widely used software package for agent-based modeling.

Very Little Evolutionary Game Theory (Richard McElreath)

Five 2-hour lectures demonstrating how simple models of strategic interaction illuminate important topics in the evolution of animal behavior, along with extensive notes.

Statistical Rethinking 2023 (Richard McElreath)

This course teaches data analysis, but it focuses on scientific models. The unfortunate truth about data is that nothing much can be done with it, until we say what caused it. We will prioritize conceptual, causal models and precise questions about those models. We will use Bayesian data analysis to connect scientific models to evidence. And we will learn powerful computational tools for coping with high-dimension, imperfect data of the kind that biologists and social scientists face.

SAPIENS Public Writing Training

We created this self-directed course because we’ve seen the positive and meaningful impacts of anthropologists sharing their ideas with a broad global readership. We also recognize that the storytelling style in newspapers, magazines, and online publications—and the path to getting published in these outlets—is very different from what you may be used to in academic publishing. So, we harnessed our experiences and insider knowledge as editors, journalists, and anthropologists. We combined these with writer testimonials and examples of successful anthropological writing from a variety of publications. We distilled it all into seven chapters that will help you write compelling stories for popular publications.

Datasets and research tools

D-Place: Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment

From the foods we eat, to who we can marry, to the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is often limited by the ways it traditionally has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access books and articles.

D-PLACE represents an attempt to bring together this dispersed corpus of information. It aims to make it easy for individuals to contrast their own cultural practices with those of other societies, and to consider the factors that may underlie cultural similarities and differences. Users can build comparative datasets that include not just cultural features, but also information on the linguistic and ecological environments in which a given cultural feature was documented.

Glottobank

Glottobank is an international research consortium established to document and understand the world’s linguistic diversity. Glottobank team members have established five global databases documenting variation in language structure (Grambank), lexicon (Lexibank), paradigm systems (Parabank), numerals (Numeralbank), and phonetic changes (Phonobank).

The Database of Religious History (DRH)

The world’s first comprehensive online quantitative and qualitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history

Seshat: Global History Databank

Seshat was founded in 2011 to bring together the most current and comprehensive body of knowledge about human history in one place. The huge potential of this knowledge for testing theories about political and economic development has been largely untapped.

Our unique Databank systematically collects what is currently known about the social and political organization of human societies and how civilizations have evolved over time. This massive collection of historical information allows us and others to rigorously test different hypotheses about the rise and fall of large-scale societies across the globe and human history.

Kinbank: Database of Kinship terminology

Kinbank is a database of kinship terminologies ranging from grandparents to grandchildren, parent’s siblings and their children. You will find terminologies for 1229 languages, ranging from Aché to Zulu.