Josh Fisher

This paper examines ways in which cultural evolution theory can treat collective knowledge in human evolution, focusing on how collective knowledge complements high-fidelity copying. We distinguish between two schematic aspects of high-fidelity copying: (1) that cultural learning consists of transmission between individuals, and (2) that cumulative culture requires high-fidelity copying or imitation. After discussing these aspects and reviewing suggestions regarding the need to adapt them, we consider approaches to cultural adaptation that address the first aspect and go beyond high-fidelity copying-based social learning; in particular the notion of Distributed Adaptation (DA), in which knowledge is stored at the group level. We argue that DAs are a subset of collective knowledge phenomena, that they may take part in cumulative culture, and that high-fidelity copying is neither necessary nor sufficient for DA. Finally, we briefly discuss what collective knowledge adds to existing ideas on human evolution and the research avenues that it opens. We show that attention to collective knowledge affects the kinds of cognitive functions that are considered, specifically that it highlights cognitive functions that promote aggregation of information, and that it has the potential to affect the hypotheses about the timing and trajectory of human cultural evolution that are entertained.

This article advances a function-first account of social and individual consciousness as the engine of cumulative cultural evolution. At the social level, joint attention (a We-mode) objectifies shared scenes and compels coordination; at the individual level, consciousness is modeled as an internalized listener that selectively admits thoughts bearing familiarity/affiliative markers. This selection compresses the meaning space and steers learning toward culturally alignable content, enabling rapid acquisition of language and shared meanings in children and scalable coordination in pre-linguistic populations. Together, these mechanisms convert cheap, noisy variation—random thoughts, gestures, proto-utterances—into high-fidelity, transmissible representations, powering cultural accumulation across distance and time. The account yields testable predictions: (i) conversational asymmetries that privilege listener selectivity across cultures; (ii) developmental universals in early joint attention and fast learning under sparse input; and (iii) unconscious-to-conscious latency signatures consistent with filtering dynamics. By treating consciousness primarily as a selection-and-alignment device for human-relevant meanings, the view reframes qualia as the felt aftermath of acceptance by the internal listener and explains how social and individual consciousness jointly function as a cultural-evolution engine rather than as mere by-products.