Faking the News: Intentional Guided Variation Reflects Cognitive Biases in Transmission Chains Without Recall

Two potential forms of mutation in cultural evolution have been identified: ‘copying error’, where learners make random modifications to a behaviour and ‘guided variation’ where learners makes non-random modifications. While copying error is directly analogous to genetic mutation, guided variation is a specifically cultural process that does not have a close parallel in biological evolution. It has been suggested that the decision-making...