Helena Miton on Cultural Evolution in Music and Writing Systems

Explore the fascinating world of cultural evolution in music and writing systems through a captivating lecture by Helena Miton from the Santa Fe Institute. Delve into the dynamics of cultural transmission, mutation under different pressures, and the resilience of certain forms across time and space. Examine how cultural products like writing, art, and music evolve, subject to both environmental constraints and human psychology. Discover the convergence of universal patterns in cultural artifacts and their divergence to meet specific environmental needs. Investigate the forces that increase complexity in culture and those that draw different societies' works into shared basins of attraction. Learn about new research on structural and cognitive constraints on culture, and explore the similarities and differences between cultural and biological evolution. Gain insights into the evolution of rhythm in music and the predictable changes in letter shapes, drawing from Miton's recent studies published in Royal Society Proceedings B and Current Anthropology.

Introduction
Background
Prior research
Experimental design
Experiment setup
Preregistration
General divergence between conditions
Interonset interval
Recruitment
Ecological Constraints
Cultural vs Biological Systems
Evolutionary Regions of Music
Evolutionary Regions of Cooking
British Food
Influences
Evolution of Writing
Gelb
What do communication systems do
The language
Algorithmic measures
Keyboards
Less Variation
Data
Results
Takehome insights
Property of culture