Chater, N., & Christiansen, M. H.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 49, e394. doi:10.1017/S0140525X25103981
How has human culture become so complex? We argue that a key process is social tinkering: the gradual accumulation of ad hoc innovations to the social rules that coordinate behavior in response to immediate challenges. Momentary innovations provide precedents that can be reused, entrenched, adapted, and recombined to handle future challenges. Interactions between these social rules create rich cultural systems (languages, ethics, and political organization) through processes of spontaneous order, not deliberate design. We distinguish between six overlapping and interacting stages that lead to the accumulation of cultural complexity, and consider implications for theories of individual cognition and cultural evolution more generally.
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