Knowledge Synthesis in the Cultural Evolution Literature

Abstract

A recent survey of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines working on cultural evolution (Brewer et al. 2017) aimed to identify the largest “grand challenges” facing the development of increasingly sophisticated work on the evolution of culture. The challenge of “knowledge synthesis” was – to a striking degree – the most important one identified by this research. Whether and how knowledge is being “synthesized” in cultural evolution is a problem with a significant empirical component. What disciplines make up cultural evolution work? When do those disciplines collaborate, and when does that collaboration fail to take place? We can begin to chart these kinds of questions using tools of bibliometrics and digital humanities. In this talk, we present our efforts toward the mapping of (barriers to) knowledge synthesis in cultural evolution, drawn from several corpora of journal articles covering the various domains that have contributed to such studies. We hope that such a cartography of cultural evolution can aid workers in this area to test hypotheses about the success and failure of such synthesis over time