Missionloops · research seat (open) · cultural evolution & anthropology

Whether a network's methods ratchet upward, or decay.

A research seat on two ratchets. Our doctrine is a shared compendium of techniques that members improve from the field, and beside it runs everything informal: the tricks that pass person to person along ties of trust. Whether either builds upward or decays, and what governs it, is the seat's question. The network is being built now and will be logged from its first tie.

The mechanism this seat studies

In the field's standard account, cumulative cultural evolution is a ratchet: when each learner can learn from enough different people, they sample what came before, filter out what fails, and build upward, so a group's methods get better across generations. Below that threshold, skills decay.

Missionloops is an education system with three teachers working at once: human guides, AI trainers, and a doctrine the members themselves evolve. We engineered for the ratchet on purpose. Every member learns from many others, because the compendium¹ carries every contributor's technique and the AI trainers deliver it at the moment of need. Contributions are filtered before they enter doctrine,² and guides catch transmission errors in person. Those are the conditions the field discovered, built here as machinery. The open question is whether it works: does the doctrine ratchet, and do the informal innovations accumulate through the ties, or die with the person who found them?

What the literature already shows

Whether cumulative culture ratchets at all is contested. The field's best-known model predicts that with too few people to learn from, technique is lost. The most direct published challenge argues the model supports that relationship only under implausible conditions and conflicts with the archaeological evidence. The dispute is open, and it has been fought on models, the surviving record, and short-run laboratory groups of strangers.
No single factor drives cultural complexity. Among small-scale farmers and herders, population size predicts toolkit richness and risk of resource failure does not. Among hunter-gatherers the pattern reverses: population size does little, and risk can dominate. Which driver operates is contingent on the kind of society.
Network closure, not anything in the culture itself, governs whether a technique stays coherent. Where a craft travels through a closed network it descends like a clean family tree even when people copy widely. The outward-facing layer fragments first, while the in-group core is transmitted faithfully. In that record, structure mattered more than headcount.
Complexity grows by reusing a versatile core, with diminishing returns. The count of tools grows more slowly than the count of parts: societies diversify mostly by recombining the parts they already have, and there is no free lunch for diversity.

All of it leaves a record: who learned what, from whom, when. The branching tree of descent that phylogenetic method reconstructs from carpets and spear points centuries later is here written down as it happens. Technique passes from an operator (the person working the problem) to a guide (a person they already trust) and on to the next operator, branches across communities, and either ratchets upward or decays. Whether the ratchet engages at all is not assumed. It is the study.

The open questions

The question this seat owns is whether field-tested method accumulates across the network, and what governs it. The population-size account predicts a threshold in how many people each learner learns from; the rival finding predicts that the closure and shape of the ties matter more than the count. The network is the place to tell them apart, because both quantities can be observed directly, and the study is built so either prediction can fail.

Recombination across community boundaries. When an operator and a guide come from different communities with different tacit knowledge, do their methods collide and recombine into something neither community would reach alone, or does the boundary keep them separate the way a closed network keeps a craft within its own line?
Durability under attack. Does adversarial pressure work-harden the network that carries the method, or fracture the trust the transmission runs on?
Where it meets the rest. The accumulating, cross-community network is the civil-resilience door, where cohesion across fault lines counters divide-and-conquer. The recombination thread meets the innovation line, from mind to culture.

Why the platform is the instrument

Cultural evolution is mostly studied at the speed of generations: transmission is inferred after it has happened, from the pattern it leaves in the surviving record. The field's own review names the gap: laboratory experiments are artificially constrained, the deep-time record is observational after the fact, and neither captures technique-level evolution under real stress in real time. Here transmission and branching can be measured as they occur, and the structure of the ties is observed directly. What is logged is the transmission itself: who passed method to whom, when, across which tie. The missions people work stay encrypted, readable only by their keyholders. And because the AI trainers teach from one shared compendium, an improvement to the method reaches every learner without waiting for a human generation to turn over. Whether cumulative cultural evolution happens becomes answerable within a study instead of across centuries.

The studies this seat can run

A menu: recast any toward your own published line, or bring a question we did not anticipate.

The seat, and the terms

The seat is open, and the ask is a conversation. The terms are a free option: tell us the question you would bring, and commit only if the work is funded.

We are looking for the researcher whose line is cultural evolution and the transmission of technique, the phylogenetics of material culture, and the question of whether structure or size governs how a method accumulates. If that is your line, the instrument being built here will let you watch the tree of transmission form, a live complement to the trees you reconstruct from what survived.

scott (at) missionloops (dot) ca

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¹ The compendium is our curriculum, held as a graph rather than a book. Every technique, workflow, and field-tested lesson is a node, tagged with the protocol it serves, the proficiency it assumes, and what it depends on. Nine specialized teaching agents each work their own region of the graph, and a member's AI trainer pulls one useful node at the moment it applies, matched to what that member already knows. Nobody studies the whole thing, and nobody has to: each member's real problem walks them along their own path, so the graph can grow without limit while any one member meets only the part their life calls for. This doctrine is written and rewritten by the practitioners who use it.

² Filtered because an open contribution channel is also the system's most attackable surface. Framing that slipped into doctrine would be delivered by the AI trainers with doctrine's authority, to people at their most trusting: under pressure, on a real problem. So every contribution passes two layers, an AI filter that strips ideology and fixes formatting, then a human review for methodology drift. In this field's terms, the filters are the selection step in the loop, and they are themselves a research target: the filter must be tested before it is trusted.