The culture that wasn't?

Abstract

In recent years, researchers from many disciplines have included the concept of culture among their explicatory tools. While this is a welcome development, the notion of culture used is often not scrutinised. In particular, culture is usually equated to socially learned - or “copied” - behaviour or information. In my talk, I will present two models (one specific to chimpanzee populations and one more general) where cultural phenomena are produced without a neat distinction between social and individual learning. I will conclude by discussing in which cases conflating culture with socially learned behaviour or, related, assuming a clear distinction between individual and social learning, can be problematic in cultural evolution research.