Poulsen and DeDeo map cultural persistence as movement across a fitness landscape in which stability and long-term fitness are not equivalent. Analysing religious practices across more than six millennia and hundreds of cultures, they find that a vast combinatorial space nevertheless contains a small number of recurrent attractor configurations; some traits remain strongly fixed by context while others are comparatively fluid. The iconic idea is that cultural forms do not reproduce by exact copying alone but drift toward constrained zones of possibility. Their method combines cross-cultural historical data, machine-learning inference and cultural-attractor theory to distinguish short-term persistence from long-run evolutionary tendency. This gives culture a topology: configurations differ in how easily they transform, how strongly contexts hold them in place and which neighbouring states remain accessible. The paper bridges cultural evolution, cognitive science and complexity research by showing how durable collective forms can arise from directional pressures without requiring a single stable original or perfectly faithful transmission.
