Research / Cultural Intelligence

The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, sociality, and life history

Models the feedback between social learning and how much cognitive capacity a group can sustain.

An evolutionary agent-based model in which brain size, group size, social learning ability, mating structure and the length of the juvenile period all evolve at once rather than being assumed.

Brains grow when there is more adaptive knowledge worth storing and a better route to getting it from others. Group size and juvenile period grow with them, because both raise how much can be learned from someone else.

The runaway human trajectory falls out as a special case, under conditions the model makes explicit. Reading it as an engineering claim: capacity and transmission co-evolve, and building either one alone stalls.

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