 Many of Richerson and Boyd’s models are enlightening. As we have seen, it takes work to show that cumulative cultural adaptation does not require replication. Note, however, in favour of Sober’s scepticism, that the most interesting cultural evolutionary models are often those which show the general circumstances under which it is possible for cultural inheritance to be effective in producing adaptation. Boyd and Richerson’s claim in favour of the importance of prestige bias is primarily an effort to show how natural selection might have favoured cultural learning. Sober’s concern is with whether models such as these will also affect ‘the day-to-day research of social scientists’, who are not so interested in establishing such general conditions for cumulative cultural evolution, but who are instead interested in understanding particular episodes of social and cultural change. Even here, Richerson and Boyd’s population thinking may have some bite. They seek, for example, to explain the disappearance of important technologies on Tasmania. Drawing on the work of Joseph Henrich, they suggest (Richerson and Boyd 2005, 138) that the maintenance of technologies and the associated behaviours required to produce and operate them may require a population that is large enough for the rate of innovation to offset the degradation that results from error-prone imitation. If Boyd and Richerson are right about this episode in the history of Tasmania, then we may be able to explain the differences in the abilities of the Tasmanians, compared with other peoples, to maintain a set of technologies, merely by citing population size, rather than other forms of social or cultural difference. Note, finally, that Henrich’s model, like any populational model, must proceed by making highly simplified assumptions about the properties of the individual entities that make up the larger population. This invites a generic series of criticisms aimed at any effort at abstract modelling: Henrich’s model has been criticized by those who doubt the robustness of its assumptions and its match with empirical data (see Read 2006 for such criticism, Kline and Boyd 2010 for a response, and Houkes 2012 for a useful philosophical overview). At the same time, this abstraction constitutes a potential strength of the populational approach, for it offers us the possibility of understanding a complex system without needing comprehensive information about all of its parts.