More is Different in Cultural Evolution

Cultural evolutionary theory has provided a rich body of models to understand the mechanisms of cultural change, particularly through social learning and selection. In this chapter we step back and ask, when we talk about cultural evolution, what is it that we actually want theories of? We emphasize that what cultural evolution now requires is not simply a description of how cultural traits vary over time and space but principled theories of how the richness, diversity, and complexity of the human world emerged. %Building on insights from complex systems theory, we argue that a primary mechanism of cultural evolution is diversification through symmetry breaking, in which transitions—such as the shift from foraging to farming—introduce new organizational structures and metastable states. To explore this position, we discuss how the principles articulated in Philip Anderson’s More is Different offer a powerful conceptual framework for understanding this neglected dimension of cultural evolution. Drawing on the ``Four Anderson Principles'' developed by David Krakauer, we argue that the complexity of the human world arises through non-reductionist, emergent processes that are both central and specific to the evolution of all complex adaptive systems. This leads us to a metatheoretical position that cultural phenomena supervene on physical processes but are governed by distinct causal structures: cultural evolutionary processes are entirely consistent with fundamental physical laws but do not trivially reduce to them. This is Anderson's key insight. We conclude by discussing how this approach reframes our understanding of the human cultural evolutionary trajectory and how this perspective diverges from more mechanistic or adaptationist theories of cultural change.