Cognitive tracks of cultural inheritance: How evolved intuitive ontology governs cultural transmission

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 of intuitive 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 domain-specific cognitive trades governed by intuitive ontology is supported by independent psychological evidence and provides testable explanations for recurrent features in the anthropological record.