The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to
contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the
larger picture of life-as-it-could-be" (1989, p.1). The study and pursuit of
open-ended evolution in artificial evolutionary systems exemplifies this goal.
However, open-ended evolution research is hampered by two fundamental issues;
the struggle to replicate open-endedness in an artificial evolutionary system,
and the fact that we only have one system (genetic evolution) from which to
draw inspiration. Here we argue that cultural evolution should be seen not only
as another real-world example of an open-ended evolutionary system, but that
the unique qualities seen in cultural evolution provide us with a new
perspective from which we can assess the fundamental properties of, and ask new
questions about, open-ended evolutionary systems, especially in regard to
evolved open-endedness and transitions from bounded to unbounded evolution.
Here we provide an overview of culture as an evolutionary system, highlight the
interesting case of human cultural evolution as an open-ended evolutionary
system, and contextualise cultural evolution under the framework of (evolved)
open-ended evolution. We go on to provide a set of new questions that can be
asked once we consider cultural evolution within the framework of open-ended
evolution, and introduce new insights that we may be able to gain about evolved
open-endedness as a result of asking these questions.

人工生命研究的目标是将 “我们所知的生命” 定位于 “可能存在的生命” 之内。对开放式进化的研究受制于两个基本问题，一个是如何在人工进化系统中复制开放式性质，另一个是人工进化系统中仅有一组系统无法做到启发启迪。本文认为文化进化不仅是开放式进化系统的另一实例，而且文化进化中的独特特征为我们提供了一个新的视角，我们可以从中评估基本属性，并提出新的问题。本文提供了文化作为进化系统的概述，突出人类文化进化作为开放式进化系统的有趣案例，并将文化进化置于开放式进化的（进化）框架下。我们提供了一组新问题，一旦我们将文化进化纳入开放式进化的框架内，就可以提出这些问题，并介绍我们可以通过提出这些问题而获得的关于开放式进化的进化共性方面的新见解。