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#774 Andrew Buskell: Cultural Evolution, Cumulative Culture, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

The Dissenter

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The Evolution of Cumulative Culture

Some people have been arguing for I'd say a couple decades that cumulative culture is distinctively human. And of course like all sorts of traits that are claimed to be distinctively human the more we look around particularly the animal kingdom we tend to find precisely those kinds of traits as being unique to humans. So what we're seeing right now in this debate is people trying to reconcile these sorts of conditions or these sorts of gold standard accounts with new cases and some people are saying yes cumulative culture is something we find across the animal kingdom whereas other people want to say no there is something quite qualitatively distinct about human culture.

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