This has some important implications. First, it’s probably pointless in macroscopic, and especially archaeological data, to ask questions about whether something is “conformist”, but I say probably only because there might be some limiting portion of the parameter space where the effect is strong enough to survive the various types of averaging. This is sort of akin, in many ways, to the fact that all the stuff that characterizes things on the quantum level gets averaged and “decohered” away to yield the classical physics we see at large scales.

Second, it means we probably can’t detect much about the history of populations from frequency time-series data. There’s a ton of literature in population genetics on trying to squeeze demographic history out of frequency spectra, and the basic conclusion that I find convincing is that the “multiplicity factor” is too high — too many different microscopic trajectories yield the same macroscopic frequency distribution, so basically there’s no warrant for choosing a “most likely” history. This is basically a “theory-internal” version of equifinality, but I think the latter term is best reserved for situations where two or more alternative model explanations yield the same prediction. Here we’re really talking about the fact that the *entropy* of the system yields a lot of uncertainty about which microstate you’re in given any macrostate.

I need to think more about your sharing/idiosyncrasy argument but there’s clearly an important case to be made there.

Interestingly, this came up for me again reading the Steele paper — they fail to falsify the neutral model and seem puzzled by that inability, and seem to blame it on the usual — not finding the exact units needed to “track” cultural transmission. Which reminded me that we need to recast CT in terms of information theory and “continuity of mutual information”, not “units of transmission.” And that ties into your last paragraph about continuity necessarily hiding the idiosyncrasy because we wouldn’t recognize similarity from idiosyncrasy. That’s quite true. We can probably only see continuity of information flow.

Part of the problem may indeed lay in the nature of the units — measuring phenomena in terms of culture (sharing) may mean that any variability that can possibly be measured at spatial and temporal scales of interest to anthropologists/archaeologists (in the non-psychology mode) would by definition be unable to measure the idiosyncrasies that would be explicable in terms of culture (i.e., sharing/inheritance/continuity). In other words, biasing might require such idiosyncratic measures that they then would be useless in a “cultural” sense (i.e., demonstrating sharing). I suppose its not an all or nothing thing, but it would be interesting to model a “threshold” of idiosyncratic-ness for units to see at what point (relative to a whole bunch of other things) that the units no longer bear “continuity” critical for identify inheritance.

You might wait a bit and see if the rumored Apple tablet comes out. The price point will likely be in Kindle DX territory or a bit higher, but the functionality is likely to be much better. Some of the iRex readers are superb, but they’re even higher priced.