Science Sundays: Cultural Innovation

By: Meradeth Houston on 9:19 AM

Welcome back to Science Sundays! Before I launch into today's topic, I thought I'd note that there's a Giveaway going on over at Once Upon a Twilight--who doesn't like super easy giveaways on a Sunday?

Today I thought I'd talk a little bit about the sources of new cultural innovation. I mean, it doesn't take much looking around to see how diverse human culture is. From person to person, family to family, population to population, we all do lots of things differently when it comes to our culture. (By culture, I mean stuff that we've learned through social learning--either from parents or friends or teachers--that isn't totally encoded for in our genes.)

Some of the reasons why we have so much variability in our cultures is because a lot of different populations have come about in different environments (imagine that! :). Anyhow, differences in clothing and such are a great example--cultures tend to wear more where it's colder (I've officially turned into the kid from A Christmas Story every time I go outside now!), and a little less where it's warmer.

Ummm, just no.

We also have differences based on what is called Cultural Drift--stuff that changes due to chance. Things like styles or fads are good examples: different things become popular for one reason or another in a different region, and suddenly everyone's wearing their boots over their pants and that's the "in" thing. (I honestly scratched my head at the boot-over-pants thing when I first saw it with uggs in Cali, and now I find myself doing it--cultural transmission at work!)

Of course, all the variation the exists in the first place was from someone out there who decided "Hey, I'm going to make something new and cool." So, props to Steve Jobs and the iPod, Thomas Edison and the phonograph (hmm, maybe that should be in reverse order), and Levi for blue jeans :) And of course, all the other inventors out there who had a brilliant idea and created it.

Now, new ideas are awesome, but being human, we like to copy stuff, and no I don't mean downloading illegal movies and songs. I mean, duplicate things. Another source of variation comes from the fact that we're not so great at this all the time--something called imperfect, or error-prone transmission. It works a lot like the game Telephone. We don't always make a perfect replica, and little errors are incorporated, and more and more errors build up, until we have something pretty different. There are lots of examples of this, but my personal favorites are the "Nailed It" memes online :)

(And now you know why I really wrote this post--to get to waste time searching for these!)

Tune in next week as I think I may have actually convinced the resident physicist to write a post for us!