About Us
The Asian Cultural Evolution (ACE) seminar series is organized by Kenji Itao, Xinyue Pan, and Wataru Toyokawa. The ACE seminar aims to strengthen the international network of researchers studying cultural evolution, with a particular focus on (but not limited to) scholars based in Asia. For now, we plan to hold seminars on a bimonthly basis. The seminars will take place online on the third Tuesday of every odd-numbered month at 19:00 JST (18:00 Perth/Singapore/Beijing, 19:00 Tokyo/Seoul, 20:00 Sydney). Researchers and students from any field related to cultural evolution are welcome, including anthropology, social psychology, economics, mathematical biology, informatics, complex systems theory, and more.
To receive regular updates about the seminars, you can join our mailing list by sending a blank email to ace-seminar+subscribe@googlegroups.com. We will send information about each seminar to the mailing list, and we encourage you to share this opportunity with anyone who might be interested.
The 9th seminar
Date: March 17th, 19:00-20:30 (JST)
Speaker: VPS Ritwika (UCLA)
Title: Infant-caregiver vocal interactions as an interactive foraging process: navigating inherent temporal structure in interactive behavioural time series
Abstract: Language is simultaneously an important carrier of culture and a complex, adaptive, cultural system, with distinct dynamics across developmental and evolutionary timescales. Within the developmental perspective, understanding how vocal interaction dynamics during early childhood shapes language acquisition and the development of communicative frameworks can inform the study of cross-generational transmission and evolution of language, and by extension, culture. In this talk, I use naturalistic, daylong, interactive audio data collected longitudinally to demonstrate the bi-directional excitatory effects of social vocal interactions on both infant and caregiver vocal behaviours by employing an 'interpersonal foraging' framework where infants and their caregivers can be thought of as interacting foragers modifying each other's vocal behaviour through social interactions. I also demonstrate the necessity of controlling for inherent temporal structure in behavioural event series when assessing interactive effects, through the lens of the dyadic infant-caregiver interactive vocal system, and present a correlation metric between consecutive inter-event intervals as a generalisable measure of temporal structure that may be robust across disparate time scales compared to other metrics.
Adult caregiver vocal responses are believed to promote more frequent and more advanced infant vocalisations. However, coordination patterns in the inherent hierarchical temporal clustering of infant and caregiver vocal interactions over the course of a day create a confound for reliably measuring immediate turn-by-turn effects of social vocal input within real-world vocal behaviour. We first quantify temporal clustering in infant and caregiver vocalisation events in daylong naturalistic infant-centered (ages 3, 6, 9, and 18 months) audio recordings using positive correlations between successive inter-vocalisation event intervals (IEIs). Informed by flight time analyses in foraging studies, we develop an analytical framework to assess the effect of social input on the timing of subsequent infant and caregiver vocalisations after controlling for endogenous temporal dynamics as quantified by positive IEI-to-IEI correlations. For both infants and adults, receiving a social response predicts a shorter subsequent inter-event interval (IEI) than in the absence of a response. These results support a conceptualisation of infant-caregiver vocal interactions as an ‘interpersonal foraging’ process with inherent multiscale dynamics wherein social responses serve as foraged-for resources. The analytic approaches introduced here offer a broadly applicable framework to study interactive behaviours in other modalities, contexts, and species by decoupling endogenous and exogenous dynamics.
The 8th seminar
Date: January 27th, 19:00-20:30 (JST)
Speaker: Christopher Kavanagh (College of Contemporary Psychology, Rikkyo University)
Title: What Are Rituals For? Evolutionary Functions, Cross-Cultural Intuitions, and Collective Action Problems
Abstract: Collective rituals are argued to function as social technologies that support cooperation, coordination, and group cohesion. From an evolutionary and cultural perspective, rituals have been proposed to serve multiple functions, including signaling commitment, regulating norms, managing uncertainty, and resolving internal conflict. Yet an open question remains: do people intuitively associate particular ritual forms with specific social problems, and are these intuitions shared across cultures?
In this talk, I draw on recent evolutionary and cultural theories of ritual alongside new evidence from a set of preregistered cross-cultural experiments (N > 2,800) conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, India, and Japan. Across three studies, participants evaluated different ritual forms in relation to collective action scenarios involving coordination, intragroup conflict, and environmental uncertainty. We find substantial cross-cultural convergence in preferences for low-arousal doctrinal and celebratory rituals, alongside context-specific intuitions: confessional rituals are preferentially selected for managing internal conflict, while divination rituals are more salient in situations that involve managing uncertainty. At the same time, culturally specific patterns emerge, including stronger alignment with Christian-associated rituals in Western samples and greater diversity of ritual choices in India and Japan. I conclude by discussing how these findings relate to broader debates about the evolutionary functions of ritual.
The 7th seminar
Date: November 18th, 19:00-20:30 (JST)
Speaker: Quentin D Atkinson (School of Psychology, University of Auckland)
Title: What a phylogeny of all the world’s languages can teach us about the past, present and future of human cultural diversity
Abstract: Since Darwin, it has been recognised that languages, like species, evolve via a process of descent with modification. Darwin even used the notion of a global genealogy of the world’s languages to bolster his argument for the origin of species. Yet while biologists have gone on to infer genealogical relationships between all living things, including those at the root of the ‘tree of life’, there is no widely accepted global tree of the world’s languages. Two centuries of linguistic scholarship has identified more than 200 language families and almost as many isolates, but linguists remain extremely skeptical of attempts to infer deeper genealogical connections. In this talk I will explain how, even given linguists’ well-founded concerns, newly available data and Bayesian inference techniques now make it possible to overcome many of the limitations of earlier work and generate a posterior distribution of global language trees. Rather than a single global tree, this distribution of trees provides a principled estimate of what can and cannot be said about the origins of the world’s ethnolinguistic diversity given current evidence. I will present such a treeset, and then show how, despite considerable phylogenetic uncertainty, it provides new insights into the past, present and future of human cultural and linguistic diversity. These include addressing longstanding questions from across the social sciences, such as how to quantify ethnolinguistic diversity, what ecological and cultural factors drive the gain and loss of ethnolinguistic diversity, which cultures and regions carry the most ethnolinguistic diversity, and how accounting for these ancient connections between cultures is critical for drawing valid inferences about culture and cognition in the modern world.
The 6th seminar
Date: September 22nd, 19:00-20:30 (JST)
Speaker: Siyang Luo (Sun Yat-sen University)
Title: Culturomics and the Concept of Harmony Between Humans and Nature
Abstract: Climate change and human sustainability represent major global challenges that require collaborative solutions through interdisciplinary integration of psychology, earth sciences, environmental sciences, computational sciences, anthropology, and more. While culture serves as a vital mechanism for human adaptation to nature, prior cultural research has largely adopted a reductionist perspective, focusing on isolated scales and single-dimensional features. We propose a cross-scale, interdisciplinary research framework of Culturomics to understand and explore culture from a systems science perspective and investigate the link between climate change and the evolution of human culture and civilization. Grounded in the traditional Chinese philosophy of harmony between humans and nature (天人合一), our research integrates agent-based modeling, historical ethnographic analysis, cross-cultural assessments, psychological and behavioral experiments, and neuroimaging techniques. In combination with advanced analytical tools such as large language models and representational similarity analysis, this project aims to reveal how weather variability shapes human cultural values by altering adaptive environmental behaviors, and to uncover the underlying psychological mechanisms, neural substrates, and evolutionary patterns.
The 5th seminar
Date: July 29th, 19:00-20:30 (JST)
Speaker: Ryutaro Uchiyama (Singapore University of Technology and Design)
Title: Motor–environment exploration in the human developmental niche
Abstract: In real behavioral ecologies, adaptive learning requires simultaneous exploration of both motor control and environmental task structure ("world model"), each presenting its own form of open-ended search complexity. We know much about each of these learning domains, but relatively little about their joint exploration space. I propose that this dual motor–environment exploration is crucial for understanding the human evolutionary niche. Human agency prolifically shapes environments that in turn shape our learning trajectories, presumably yielding a reciprocal (niche-constructive) feedback loop that couples mental structures to environmental structures and vice versa. Dual motor–environment exploration helps illuminate the explore–exploit landscape of this deeply collective epigenetic milieu. It also offers unique computational and teleological perspectives on phenomena like cultural learning, social cognition, and behavioral creativity – complementing the population-level stochastic mechanisms proposed by cultural evolutionary theories.
The 4th seminar
Date: May 20th, 19:00-20:30 (JST)
Speaker: Eita Nakamura (Kyushu University)
Title: Data scientific methods for analyzing music style evolution
Abstract: In recent years, there has been growing interest in research analyzing temporal evolutions in artistic data, such as music and visual art, using large-scale datasets. In this talk, I will present methods and findings from studies on music style evolution based on techniques from music information processing and generative modeling. I will address several key challenges in the evolutionary analysis of music data, including the extraction of trends in high-dimensional feature spaces, understanding of dynamics in cluster structures, analysis of reference relations in knowledge transmission, and identification of the driving forces behind musical evolution, as time permits. I hope to discuss with participants how we might develop general-purpose analytical frameworks for investigating the evolution of complex cultures characterized by high-dimensional traits.
The 3rd seminar
Date: March 18th, 19:00-20:30 (JST)
Speaker: Lusha Zhu (Peking University)
Title: Mental representation and decision-making in an interconnected world
Abstract: Social networks shape our beliefs and choices by constraining what information we receive and from whom. Yet the mechanism by which the human brain interacts with networked environments remains unclear. Two computational challenges stand out when we try to learn from interconnected peers. First, information flowing along network connections is typically interdependent and varies in its informativeness. So how does the brain effectively integrate network-derived information? Second, individuals can hardly take into account the topological structure of the entire network when interacting with it. So which social connections are considered and which are ignored, how will the streamlined network representation affect our perception and navigation of the social world? In this talk, I will present a series of recent work that uses lab experiment on simulated networks, computational modeling, and fMRI to investigate social network-related learning and representation. Our finding unifies a variety of seemingly disparate biases in social perception and decision-making, shedding light on the cognitive roots of some important societal conundrums, such as biased social sensing and misinformation propagation.
The 2nd seminar
Date: February 18th, 19:00-20:30 (JST)
Speaker: Kevin Hong (University of Macau)
Title: The Cultural Evolution of Games of Chance - A Historical Investigation of Chinese Gambling
Abstract: Chance-based gambling has been a recurrent cultural activity throughout history and across many diverse human societies. In this paper, I combine quantitative and qualitative data and present a cultural evolutionary framework to explain why the odds in games of chance in premodern China appeared “designed” to ensure a moderate yet favorable house advantage. This is especially intriguing since extensive research in the history of probability has shown that prior to the development of probability theory people had very limited understanding of the nature of random events, and were generally disinclined to think mathematically about the frequency of their occurrence. I argue that games of chance in the context of gambling may have culturally evolved into their documented forms via a process of selective imitation and retention, and neither the customers nor the gambling houses understood the probability calculus involved in these games.
The 1st seminar
Date: November 19th, 19:00-20:30 (JST)
Speaker: Kenji Itao (RIKEN)
Title: Principles of the Evolution of Diverse Human Social Structures: Kinship and Gift-giving
Abstract: Anthropologists have long observed structural similarities among geographically distant societies. To elucidate the origins of these similarities, I develop simple models of human interactions grounded in ethnographic observations, simulating the emergence of social structures. This approach uncovers the fundamental mechanisms and conditions that give rise to typical social configurations.
In this talk, I focus on two topics. The first concerns the evolution of kinship structures in clan societies. In many traditional small-scale societies, families are categorized into cultural groups known as clans, whose members believe they share a common ancestry. Clan membership determines permissible marriage partners, shaping structural relationships between clans—known as kinship structures in cultural anthropology. I construct a model of kinship interactions encompassing kin and in-law cooperation and mating competition. Multilevel evolutionary simulations demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of kinship structures, with environmental dependencies that align closely with empirical data.
The second topic explores the transition of social organizations through competitive gift-giving. Gift-giving is a prevalent form of interaction within non-monetized economies. I introduce a simple model of competitive gift-giving, where amplified reciprocation is required. The model elucidates how gifts provide material goods to recipients and confer social reputation upon donors, thereby driving social change. Numerical simulations reveal transitions across four distinct phases, characterized by varying social network structures and distributions of wealth and social reputation: specifically, the band, tribe, chiefdom, and kingdom. This analysis offers quantitative criteria for classifying social organizations, accompanied by empirically measurable explanatory parameters.