The human cultural explosion is often explained in terms of ‘liberating events’, or of a newly acquired flexibility in mental representations. This chapter considers a domain where such flexibility should be maximal, that of religious representations, and shows that actual cultural transmission is in fact constrained by evolved properties of ontological categories and principles. More generally, this suggests that the ‘cultural mind’ typical of recent human evolution is not so much an unconstrained mind as a mind equipped with a host of complex, specialised capacities that make certain kinds of mental representations likely to succeed in cultural transmission.

Introduction

The hallmark of the modern human mind is that it is a cultural mind. Humans receive vast amounts of information from cultural elders and peers. They use that information to build conceptual structures, some aspects of which are group-specific and form the basis of what we usually call ‘cultures’. What made the modern mind cultural? There are two complementary issues here. One is to describe the evolutionary emergence of cognitive capacities that made (and make) culture possible. Another is to examine how these evolved capacities have a constraining effect on actual human cultures; that is, how they make some cultural trends, and some types of cultural representations, more likely than others to appear in human groups.

In this chapter I suggest that the question of cultural evolution is all too often approached from the first angle only.