2020/11/04 by Mason Youngblood, Youngblood, Mason, Karim Baraghith +3
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Applications (stat.AP) #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Language and cultural evolution #Music and Audio Processing #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2011.02460
openalex publication_date 2020/11/04 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Cultural phylogenies, or "trees" of culture, are typically built using\nmethods from biology that use similarities and differences in artifacts to\ninfer the historical relationships between the populations that produced them.\nWhile these methods have yielded important insights, particularly in\nlinguistics, researchers continue to debate the extent to which cultural\nphylogenies are tree-like or reticulated due to high levels of horizontal\ntransmission. In this study, we propose a novel method for phylogenetic\nreconstruction using dynamic community detection that explicitly accounts for\ntransmission between lineages. We used data from 1,498,483 collaborative\nrelationships between electronic music artists to construct a cultural\nphylogeny based on observed population structure. The results suggest that,\nalthough the phylogeny is fundamentally tree-like, horizontal transmission is\ncommon and populations never become fully isolated from one another. In\naddition, we found evidence that electronic music diversity has increased\nbetween 1975 and 1999. The method used in this study is available as a new R\npackage called DynCommPhylo. Future studies should apply this method to other\ncultural systems such as academic publishing and film, as well as biological\nsystems where high resolution reproductive data is available, to assess how\nlevels of reticulation in evolution vary across domains.\n