Burkart et al. conflate the domain-specificity of cognitive processes with the statistical pattern of variance in behavioural measures that partly reflect those processes. General intelligence is a statistical abstraction, not a cognitive trait, and we argue that the former does not warrant inferences about the nature or evolution of the latter.

As Kline envisages, there is an important relationship between cultural attraction and teaching. The very function of teaching is to make the content taught an attractor. Teaching, moreover, typically fulfills its function by exploiting a variety of factors of cultural attraction that help make its content learnable and teachable.

What is art? Marcel Duchamp made this question pertinent when he developed his ‘Readymades’: ordinary, manufactured objects that he presented as art. In this paper, I use pragmatics – the branch of linguistics concerned with language use in context, and which has its historical roots in the philosophy of language – to argue that, if we accept that art is a form of communication, from artist to audience, then Duchamp was correct to claim that anything can be art, so long as it is presented as such.

Smaldino's target article draws on and seeks to add to a literature that has partially rejected orthodox, gene-centric evolutionary theory. However, orthodox theory has much to say about group-level traits. The target article does not reference or refute these views, and provides no explicit arguments for this narrow approach. In this commentary we: (i) give two examples of topics that the target article might and probably should have discussed (cultural epidemiology and the psychology of individual differences); and (ii) argue that the orthodox approach has much more to say about the emergence of group-level traits than the target article recognises, or gives credit for.