The social tinkering hypothesis is a useful addition to the cultural evolutionary toolkit, building fruitfully on the authors’ prior research on the role of playful exploration in coordinative domains for the emergence of cultural phenomena like language (Christiansen & Chater, Reference Christiansen and Chater2022). The authors do themselves a disservice by ignoring work on related phenomena like scaffolds and repeated assembly in cultural evolution (Caporael, Reference Caporael2003; Caporael, Griesemer, & Wimsatt, Reference Caporael, Griesemer and Wimsatt2013; Wimsatt & Griesemer, Reference Wimsatt, Griesemer, Sansom and Brandon2007; Smaldino, Reference Smaldino2014). Such work develops the idea that cultural phenomena are continuously constructed through repeated interaction across both developmental and generational timescales, and it would be useful to integrate the ideas developed there with those presented in the target article. That said their target article adds constructively to this literature by clearly laying out some of the dynamical processes involved.

The authors are also right to emphasize the role of selective forces in cultural evolution, which have been underappreciated and undertheorized. However, while cognitive biases, preferences, and schema are indeed important selection processes, so are the forces of coercion, conquest, and oppression (Smaldino, Reference Smaldino2026). I find the biggest fault with the argument laid out in the target article to be an overly strong emphasis on cooperative endeavors, downplaying the role of conflict in the evolution of cultural complexity. Much of the history of complex human societies was driven not by coordinative tinkering but by the struggle for existence. While social evolution is often driven by mutual aid, cultural evolution is also red in tooth and claw.

Chater and Christiansen might argue that this is beside the point, that social tinkering is also how humans solved conflicts. Such an argument might possibly hold for cultural evolution in the Pleistocene epoch, when human societies were relatively small and egalitarian (Boehm, Reference Boehm1999; Boyd & Richerson, Reference Boyd and Richerson2022). But it doesn’t hold when considering the complex societies that have characterized human groups in the millennia since the Holocene transition. This history has been driven as much by conflict and coercion as by coordination and cooperation (Turchin, Reference Turchin2015). More importantly, such societies are characterized by extreme inequality of power, and such concentration of power in the hands of a relative few is perhaps the key difference for understanding cultural evolution in the Holocene. Even while many innovations emerge from the masses, selection on whose voices are heard, whose ideas are adopted, and whose perspectives are popularized is nevertheless shaped by dynamics of power and influence that are as yet unaccounted for in the authors’ proposal. Such selection, even when apparently driven by egalitarian, bottom-up processes, is scaffolded by the architectures of information flow and by the goals of elites and institutions that control them (Smaldino et al., Reference Smaldino, Russell, Zefferman, Donath, Foster, Guilbeault, Hilbert, Hobson, Lerman, Miton, Moser, Lasser, Schmer-Galunder, Shapiro, Zhong and Patt2025).

Institutional selection provides many salient examples (Smaldino & McElreath, Reference Smaldino and McElreath2016; Smaldino, Reference Smaldino2026). Consider the contemporary news media. The supposed goal for the media is to inform the public about important information that concerns them, allowing them to understand what’s going on and to make informed decisions. But, in the words of Stafford Beer, the purpose of a system is what it does. While you can learn a lot by reading or watching the news, you sure as hell don’t get an unbiased picture of the world. This is because the stories that get told, and the people who tell them, are selected to promote specific narratives and information landscapes. Hermann and Chomsky’s (Reference Hermann and Chomsky1988) “propaganda model” describes how powerful elites subtly shape the media landscape to ensure that only those individuals whose views and commitments are aligned with elite interests are promoted to positions of influence. This need not require any individual journalist to distort or censor themselves, only that their beliefs and behaviors dictate whether they get a chance to be heard. A recent instance of this dynamic played out in the United States in September 2025, following the assassination of right-wing podcaster and provocateur Charlie Kirk. MSNBC fired its senior political analyst Matthew Dowd when he remarked that “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” In the same week, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade suggested on air that homeless people who refused to participate in government programs should be executed. Yet, despite calls for his dismissal, Fox News took no action other than to provide a platform for Kilmeade’s perfunctory public apology. In this way, institutional selection shaped the continued evolution of the U.S. media landscape. How does social tinkering fit into this picture?

As another example, consider the spread of Christianity in medieval Europe. This was not driven primarily by individuals tinkering locally with belief systems and norms that helped them meet goals of cognitive satisfaction and cooperation, though these traits may have helped with aspects of local adoption. Rather, Christianity gained dominance as a mechanism of control for elites, providing new ways to extract resources and to punish those who resisted (Berend, Reference Berend2007; Henrich, Reference Henrich2020). James Scott (Reference Scott1998) coined the term “seeing like a state” to refer to the many ways in which elites alter aspects of societies to make observation, extraction, and control easier – in other words, to make things more “legible” for themselves. Elites may be engaging in social tinkering to accomplish this, but in a manner that is hardly bottom-up.

The key role of elites in the cultural evolution of complex societies complicates the role of social tinkering. The word “tinkering” implies leisure and freedom to explore freely, even if there are some constraints on that exploration. A theory of cultural complexity through social tinkering must also account for the ways in which tinkering has been constrained by shackles and motivated by power. Who gets to tinker, and what determines which products of that tinkering are selected?