The outstanding diversity among cultures might be exactly what leads so many scientists to seek common processes that might account for both variation and surprising similarities. Singh proposes that many recurrent cultural forms (attractors) evolve convergently via a process of subjective selection in which individuals and communities retain and transmit a perceptual bias by which they subjectively value key outcomes and judge certain actions as efficacious in achieving them, even when such actions lack objective efficacy. Such purported processes may help account for the fact that some problematic practices persist despite their deleterious impact on the well-being of individuals and/or communities. We wish to praise this paper for bringing forward previously underemphasized content on this topic. First, subjective selection acknowledges and emphasizes a much-needed heavy role in cultural evolution for perceptual bias, instrumentally generated behavior, instrumental superstitious behavior, and (more generally) individual behavioral/biobehavioral processes. It also implies (but perhaps does not specify) that those individual processes involve not only reinforcement learning via “objective goals” but also reinforcement learning via socially mediated feedback (since subjective preference as described here can lead to differential social feedback/social learning). We also appreciate the inclusion of concrete variables in purported tests of the proposal; indeed, goals and perceptual biases may be understood (to avoid circular reasoning or unverifiable phenomenal reference) as a specification of which environmental events are functioning as effective learning signals; both neurobiological and behavioral tools could be used to test those suppositions in constituent individuals.

While recognizing those contributions, we also caution against presenting subjective selection as alternative, competitive, or antithetical to group-level selection. Indeed, subjective selection may serve to generate a mechanistic understanding of the underlying system upon which group selection operates. An integrative approach would still provide all the advantages that the author suggested, while also addressing the circularity endemic in the supposition that subjective selection explains cultural patterns rather than constituting something to be explained about those patterns. If subjective valuation and perceptual biases develop for any heritable reason – e.g., consistent development and transmission by social learning processes or phylogenetically selected canalization of perceptual regularities – it may increase not only individual goal attainment but also fitness for coordinating groups of individuals. If so, the tendency together with its mode of social transmission and expression may all thereby be selected as an interactor on the group level (Hull, Reference Hull1980). We would like to note that this point is equally applicable to “group selection” in the sense of multilevel natural selection (Traulsen & Nowak, Reference Traulsen and Nowak2006) as well as “group selection” in the sense of group-level cultural selection (Couto & Sandaker, Reference Couto and Sandaker2016; Glenn, Reference Glenn2004). In fact, without group-level selection, it is difficult to account for why such perceptual biases would stabilize common misattributions (such as supernatural elements) that appear to compete with true goal attainment. These may be epiphenomenal, but they may also be indirectly adaptive on the group level. In a similar manner, mate preference for disadvantageous traits in the context of phylogenetic sexual selection requires (and has often received) explanation in terms of how the preference should adaptively evolve in the choosy mate (e.g.), (Henshaw, Fromhage, & Jones, Reference Henshaw, Fromhage and Jones2022). Such choosiness may evolve because genes associated with the preferred trait convey fitness for some other reason, and the analogous possibility here would be that subjective selection develops because it produces adaptive group outcomes that overcome disadvantages. In short, subjective preferences need to be accounted for in terms of why they are preferred, and group-level selection can offer at least heuristic or even testable explanations in service to this question.

Integration also brings this work into harmony with previous literature that describes typical patterns in social behavior – both socially learned and socially coordinated – as replicated and maintained over time by virtue of increasing the fitness and/or capability for survival and provision of outcomes for the group (Baum, Reference Baum1995; Glenn et al., Reference Glenn, Malott, Andery, Benvenuti, Houmanfar, Sandaker, Todorov, Tourinho and Vasconcelos2016; Harris, Reference Harris2001; Rachlin, Reference Rachlin2019; Skinner, Reference Skinner1981; Skinner, 1953/Reference Skinner2024; Wilson, Ostrom, & Cox, Reference Wilson, Ostrom and Cox2013). This group selection might account for the development of practices that decrease immediate individual benefits or survival but also convey group-level benefits. If sets of practices or interactive patterns all arise from a single subjective preference, and if group interaction is necessary to maintain and express the cultural impact of those subjective preferences, then we would expect that both deleterious and (net) adaptive outcomes would result from the selection of a wholistic unit interactor (Hull, Reference Hull1980).

Group selection notwithstanding, it’s interesting to highlight that “groups don’t behave” (Skinner, 1953/Reference Skinner2024, p. 298); in other words, group-level selection must operate in parallel with individual-level selection. This is another advantage of integrating the subjective selection proposal with other aspects of cultural group selection. Culturally transmitted behavior that does not produce immediate benefit (or that produces aversive consequences) for the individual must still develop according to individual behavioral principles, and subjective selection posits a plausible mechanistic processes that could be important for group selection; the development of perceptual biases leading to subjective selection may create the learning environment that channels individual behavior toward group-level outcomes. One might, for example, obey ethical rules even at a cost because they are perceived as subjectively effective in procuring supernatural benefits or avoiding supernatural punishment (a perception partly supported by related social reinforcement and verbal patterns maintained via the subjective preferences of others). Overall, these perceived efficacies could lead to improved positive prosociality, cooperation, and cohesion in the group, thus increasing its chances of survival (Rachlin, Reference Rachlin2019; Wilson, Ostrom, & Cox, Reference Wilson, Ostrom and Cox2013). It’s interesting to note that, if asked, a particular individual might never describe these ultimate contingencies supporting their behavior or their group’s (Harris, Reference Harris2001).

In summary, group-cultural or multilevel phylogenetic selection may provide an ultimate explanation for the content of subjective selection as a proximate mechanism for cultural development. In other words, integrating the cultural group and individual-level processes may produce a more effective paradigm than either can do independently, as either phylogenetic and/or cultural group-level “objective” selection can account for maintaining the perceptual biases by which cultural attractors are subjectively selected.