Work

Looking for middle ground in cultural attraction theory

Year: 2019

Type: article

Abstract: In their article, Thom Scott-Phillips, Stefaan Blancke, and Christophe Heintz do a commendable job summarizing the position and misunderstandings of "cultural attraction theory" (CAT). However, they do not address a longstanding problem for the CAT framework; that while it has an encompassing theory and some well-worked out case studies, it lacks tools for generating models or empirical hypotheses of intermediate generality. I suggest that what the authors diagnose as misunderstandings are instead superficial interpretive errors, resulting from researchers who have attempted to extract generalizable hypotheses from CAT and bring them into contact with the analytical and inferential models of contemporary cultural evolutionary research.

Source: Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews

DOI: 10.1002/evan.21762

Author: Andrew Buskell

Institution: University of Cambridge

Language: English

Topic: Language and cultural evolution

Subfield: Cultural Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: John Templeton Foundation

Award: Putting the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis to the Test