Descent with Imagination: Oral Traditions as Evolutionary Lineages

Abstract

Traditional tales are, like genes and languages, products of “descent with modification”: stories mutate as they get passed on from person to person, some survive and get passed on to future generations, while others go extinct and are forgotten. But how deep are the roots of these traditions? To what extent are they entangled with other patterns of ancestry-such as those of our languages, cultures, and genes? In this chapter, I review a number of studies that have addressed these questions using theory and methods from the field of cultural evolution. I reflect on some of the wider implications of their findings for understanding the cultural success and stability of traditional stories, what they can tell us about the past, and the complex relationships between the different inheritance systems that shape human worlds.