The evolutionary accessibility of cultural fitness landscapes
- 1Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
- 2School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom
Abstract
Many human cultural and technological traits have a complex and peculiar structure. They are often characterized by multiple closely interacting parts that can form modules, and change as a result of innovation, collaboration, and social learning. A full understanding of the ways in which such cultural traits evolve requires a model that accounts for the close epistatic interaction of the constituent parts, and for the uniquely cultural processes that act on them. Here, we generalize the concept of ‘adaptive landscapes’, where populations search a landscape for optimal combinations of components. This generalization accounts for epistatic interactions, and includes processes such as modularization, communication, and collaboration, that are not features of genetic systems but may be quite common features of cultural systems. We show that modularization in combination with collaborative communication of search results is more successful, but sometimes more costly, than searching a full adaptive landscape. However, in many of the circumstances under which technology evolves, a full search of many thousands of possible modules may not be feasible since time, financial, energetic, and environmental constraints are likely to be strong. Under these conditions, our models suggest that there is a critical value for the number of modules to search below which the global optimum is more likely to be reached by searching the full landscape. The value of this threshold depends on the complexity of the technology. Overall, we suggest that analysis of cultural fitness landscapes is likely to be a fruitful avenue for research into technological change especially when combined with elements of human learning and interaction known to be important features of cultural evolution. Author summary: How human technology changes and evolves, and what forces drive its evolution are under-explored. We generalize the idea of a fitness landscape for cultural rather than genetic traits and ask whether uniquely cultural processes such as collaboration and communication can change the accessibility of cultural fitness landscapes. Technological traits share many broad structural features with the genes or proteins more typically modeled this way. For example, both are composed of many interacting interdependent parts, and can be characterized by considerable fitness epistasis. However, cultural traits are also subject to some quite different forces. When populations search a cultural landscape for optimal technologies, they can do so by deliberately restricting their search to particular parts or modules of the technology, and by collaborating with others seeking to improve other parts of the same technology. We show that this kind of modularization and collaboration makes fitness landscapes easier to search and makes populations more successful at doing so.
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BibTeX
@article{fogarty2026evolutionary,
title = {{The evolutionary accessibility of cultural fitness landscapes}},
author = {Laurel Fogarty and Rebecca B. Hoyle},
journal = {PLOS Computational Biology},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014830},
url = {https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014830},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - The evolutionary accessibility of cultural fitness landscapes
AU - Laurel Fogarty
AU - Rebecca B. Hoyle
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
JO - PLOS Computational Biology
DO - 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014830
UR - https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014830
AB - Many human cultural and technological traits have a complex and peculiar structure. They are often characterized by multiple closely interacting parts that can form modules, and change as a result of innovation, collaboration, and social learning. A full understanding of the ways in which such cultural traits evolve requires a model that accounts for the close epistatic interaction of the constituent parts, and for the uniquely cultural processes that act on them. Here, we generalize the concept of ‘adaptive landscapes’, where populations search a landscape for optimal combinations of components. This generalization accounts for epistatic interactions, and includes processes such as modularization, communication, and collaboration, that are not features of genetic systems but may be quite common features of cultural systems. We show that modularization in combination with collaborative communication of search results is more successful, but sometimes more costly, than searching a full adaptive landscape. However, in many of the circumstances under which technology evolves, a full search of many thousands of possible modules may not be feasible since time, financial, energetic, and environmental constraints are likely to be strong. Under these conditions, our models suggest that there is a critical value for the number of modules to search below which the global optimum is more likely to be reached by searching the full landscape. The value of this threshold depends on the complexity of the technology. Overall, we suggest that analysis of cultural fitness landscapes is likely to be a fruitful avenue for research into technological change especially when combined with elements of human learning and interaction known to be important features of cultural evolution. Author summary: How human technology changes and evolves, and what forces drive its evolution are under-explored. We generalize the idea of a fitness landscape for cultural rather than genetic traits and ask whether uniquely cultural processes such as collaboration and communication can change the accessibility of cultural fitness landscapes. Technological traits share many broad structural features with the genes or proteins more typically modeled this way. For example, both are composed of many interacting interdependent parts, and can be characterized by considerable fitness epistasis. However, cultural traits are also subject to some quite different forces. When populations search a cultural landscape for optimal technologies, they can do so by deliberately restricting their search to particular parts or modules of the technology, and by collaborating with others seeking to improve other parts of the same technology. We show that this kind of modularization and collaboration makes fitness landscapes easier to search and makes populations more successful at doing so.
SN - 1553-7358
SN - 1553-734X
ER -