Designing cultural multilevel selection research for sustainability science
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Humans stand out among animals in that we cooperate in large groups to exploit natural resources, and accumulate resource exploitation techniques across generations via cultural learning. This uniquely human form of adaptability is in large part to blame for the global sustainability crisis. This paper builds on cultural evolutionary theory to conceptualize and study environmental resource use and overexploitation. Human social learning and cooperation, particularly regarding social dilemmas, result in both sustainability crises and solutions. Examples include the collapse of global fisheries, and multilateral agreements to halt ozone depletion. We propose an explicitly evolutionary approach to study how crises and solutions may emerge, persist, or disappear. We first present a brief primer on cultural evolution to define group-level cultural adaptations for resource use. This includes criteria for identifying where group-level cultural adaptations may exist, and if a cultural evolutionary approach can be implemented in studying a given system. We then outline a step-by-step process for designing a study of group-level cultural adaptation, including the major methodological considerations that researchers should address in study design, such as tradeoffs between validity and control, issues of time scale, and the value of both qualitative and quantitative data and analysis. We discuss how to evaluate multiple types of evidence synthetically, including historical accounts, new and existing data sets, case studies, and simulations. The electronic supplement provides a tutorial and simple computer code in the R environment to lead users from theory to data to an illustration of an empirical test for group-level adaptations in sustainability research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.049 | 0.118 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it