CBI Seminar: Collective Intelligence, Culture and Cumulative Culture

Speaker: Andrew Whiten (School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews)

In this talk I’ll bring together some recent reviews and empirical studies by me and my collaborators that explore links between collective intelligence, culture and cumulative culture. My starting point is a theme issue of Phil Trans B for which I was an editor in 2021/2 (1), and in particular an insight from Dora Biro that culture can be considered an instance of collective intelligence spread over time, as individual contributions are sequentially incorporated into the collective that is culture and further shared with others. I describe one of our chimpanzee experiments in which the critical innovation was itself collectively achieved through the contributions of two interacting individuals (2), leading to the conclusion that collective knowledge can act as both a cause and a consequence of cumulative cultural change. Focusing then on cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), I outline a recent study developing a ‘genetic time machine’ to explore evidence for CCE in wild chimpanzees over past millennia (3). I highlight how this dovetails with evidence that ‘partial connectivity’ in social networks of humans has been found to facilitate cumulative culture in both lab experiments and studies of foraging societies (1). I will end with a quick overview of another theme issue of Phil Trans B I’m editing with members of the School of Collective Intelligence at UM6P in Morocco: ‘The evolution of collective intelligence: across species, in human development and history, and in contemporary human society’.

1. Whiten, A., Biro, D., Bredeche, N., Garland E. C. & Kirby, S. (2022) The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 377,2020.0306.
2. Whiten, A., Harrison, R. A., McGuigan, N., Vale, G. L. & Watson, S. K. (2022) Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 377,2020.0321.
3. Gunasekaram, C. et al. (2024). Population connectivity shapes the distribution and complexity of chimpanzee material culture. Science 386, 920-925.