Baumard and André (B&A) responded to the (many) comments that their original piece (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...).

Their response is linked in Alberto's post. I just got a pdf copy and will read it now; this will be a thread with my first thoughts...

Evolved psychology, eco-phenotypic feedbacks and the social construction of culture This paper responds to more than twenty commentaries on The Ecological Approach to Culture, written by researchers in evolutionary biology, behavioral…

Baumard & André answer to the commentaries to "The ecological approach to culture". An important conversation for everybody interested in application of evolutionary theory to culture.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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For those who do not have access to the papers, we have compiled the original paper, the commentaries, and our response into a single file available here:

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/n7wka...

Evolved psychology, eco-phenotypic feedbacks and the social construction of culture This paper responds to more than twenty commentaries on The Ecological Approach to Culture, written by researchers in evolutionary biology, behavioral…

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Today, our response to these commentaries is out! A huge thank you to all commentators for making this such a stimulating exchange. We hope it's useful for anyone interested in evolutionary approaches to culture:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Over 20 researchers from evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, cognitive science, or anthropology weighed in with sharp, insightful commentaries.

The ecological approach to culture The prevailing view in the literature treats cultural dynamics as fundamentally distinct from other ecological processes—governed by a second system o…

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Last year, Nicolas Baumard and I published a target article in EHB, where we propose that cultural phenomena emerge from feedbacks between evolved psychology and ecological legacies, the same mechanisms at work in any ecosystem:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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EHBEACommitteeNominationForm_Pres_Sec.doc EHBEA Committee 2026-2029: Nomination Form The EHBEA Steering Committee is calling for nominations for the following open committee positions for 2026-2029. You are invited to nominate one or more c...

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Evolutionary parsimony: an equilibrium refinement that sharply constrains the space of outcomes in games with multiple equilibria | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Evolutionary game theory loses much of its predictive power in games with multiple equilibria. For such games, this article introduces a simple and general refinement principle, grounded in evolutiona...

6/ Read the article @royalsocietypublishing.org
👉 doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

5/ Main consequence: in plausible evolutionary equilibria, reciprocal cooperation is guided by real cues of mutual benefit, never by bizarre rules tied to arbitrary cues unrelated to payoffs.

4/ What this article shows:

In reality, the bizarre strategies of the folk theorem simply have no chance of ever emerging in the first place. So there is no need for mechanisms to choose between them—the problem is essentially an artefact of misapplied game theory.

3/ The most common solution in the literature: group selection.

Since equilibria are too many, you (supposedly) need group selection to pick the most cooperative ones.

2/ Why is this a problem?
Because it prevents game theory from making precise predictions about social behavior.

1/ The old problem: the folk theorem and the extravagant diversity of equilibria in repeated games.
Game theory allows a proliferation of bizarre, counterintuitive patterns of behavior to qualify as equilibria.

Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore?

Well, I wrote about it.

🧵

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Our #study finds that #male #dominance isn't the norm among #primates, and starts to unravel what shapes flexibility in intersexual power

paper (OA) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500405122

press release www.mpg.de/24986976/0630-evan-beyon...

a man in a red jacket is eating a sandwich ALT: a man in a red jacket is eating a sandwich

EHB commentaries on Baumard and André's "The ecological approach to culture" are growing (see "Commentaries" section at the end). Good.
www.sciencedirect.com/journal/evol...

Reconciling Our Three Traditions: Human Behavioral Ecology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Cultural Evolution - HBES – by Nicolas Baumard & Jean-Baptiste André The evolutionary social sciences are grounded in the idea that evolutionary theory provides a unified framework to explain human behavior, including social n...

"a forest is not treated as the output of a second inheritance system or as a group-level adaptation... culture is not a transmitted substance; it is the structured context that emerges from repeated and overlapping individual actions"