Cognitive Tracks of Cultural Inheritance: How Evolved Intuitive Ontology Governs Cultural Transmission

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Abstract
“Acquired culture” depends on social transmission and displays salient cross‐cultural variability. It seems unconnected to adaptive fitness. It is, however, constrained by evolved properties of the mind. Recurrent—not necessarily universal—features of acquired culture can be explained by taking into account the early development and constraining power ofintuitive ontology, a set of principled domain‐specific inferential capacities. These allow us to predict recurrent trends in domains as diverse as folk‐psychology, representations of natural kinds, the uses of literacy, the acquisition of scientific beliefs, and even the limiting‐case of religious ontologies. In all these domains the notion of cultural transmission along domainspecificcognitive tracksgoverned by intuitive ontology is supported by independent psychological evidence and provides testable explanations for recurrent features in the anthropological record, [evolution, culture, cultural universal, cognitive development, evolutionary psychology]