ABSTRACT

In 1994, Mark Pagel and I proposed that phylogenetic comparative methods were appropriate, and indeed essential, for testing co-evolutionary hypotheses in cultural or bio-cultural evolution (Mace and Pagel 1994). It is worth clarifying that we do not mean the comparative method as used by linguists (which means the comparison of words to identify common origins); we use the term "comparative method' as do evolutionary biologists, who use it to refer to comparison across populations or species to test an adaptive hypothesis.