Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abl7446
Understanding the evolution of human technology is key to solving the mystery of our origins. Current theories propose that technology evolved through the accumulation of modifications that were mostly transmitted between individuals by blind copying and the selective retention of advantageous variations.
An alternative account is that high-fidelity transmission in the context of cumulative technological culture is supported by technical reasoning, which is a reconstruction mechanism that allows individuals to converge to optimal solutions.
We tested these two competing hypotheses with a microsociety experiment, in which participants had to optimize a physical system in partial- and degraded-information transmission conditions.
Our results indicated an improvement of the system over generations, which was accompanied by an increased understanding of it. The solutions produced tended to progressively converge over generations. These findings show that technical reasoning can bolster high-fidelity transmission through convergent transformations, which highlights its role in the cultural evolution of technology.
Technical reasoning is a reconstruction mechanism that allows us to recover from partial or degraded information obtained through social learning and therefore guarantees the high-fidelity transmission of advantageous technologies (i.e., the high similarity between the wheel configurations). Said differently, technical reasoning can be viewed as a potential cognitive mediator of CTC that allows individuals to filter information acquired either through their own experience (asocial learning) or through social learning, by extracting relevant information and rejecting irrelevant information, irrespective of the origin of this information (25). Technical reasoning might participate in both the innovative component and the high-fidelity component of CTC, thus implying that the distinction between these two components might be of convenience rather than of cognitive distinctness.
- F. Osiurak, E. Reynaud, The elephant in the room: What matters cognitively in cumulative technological culture. Behav. Brain Sci. 43, e156 (2020).