Dwight W Read

• PhD
• Professor at University of California, Los Angeles

The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when c...

A mathematical model purporting to demonstrate that the interaction population size of a group of social learners is a primary determinant of the level of technological complexity achieved by the members of that group through imitation of the most skilled individual in the group has been proposed. Empirical validation of the model has been attempte...

We seek explanation for how a species with our complex social systems could have arisen. We argue that an “innovation innovation” took place during hominin evolution that decoupled organizational change from a Darwinian evolutionary process and underlies the forms of social organization we find in human societies today. We discuss enculturation as...

Reviewed in 2008sep CHOICE. "Trained as a mathematician, Read (anthropology and statistics, UCLA) developed this handbook/textbook for upper-level students and professional archaeologists based upon his research and his seminars on archaeological classification. Eleven carefully crafted, thoughtful chapters span the history, method, and theory of t...

Some comparative ontogenetic data imply that effective working-memory capacity develops in ways that are independent of brain size in humans. These are interpreted better from neuroscientific considerations about the continuing development of neuronal architecture in adolescents and young adults, than from one about gross brain mass which already i...

The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title: “What Is Kinship All About?” and now this article titles itself “What is Kinship All About? Again.” Why? Whereas we have over a century’s worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is pu...

The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title:“What Is Kinship All About?” and now this article titles itself “What is Kinship All About? Again.” Why? Whereas we have over a century’s worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is pub...

In this article we review publications relevant to addressing widely reported claims in both the academic and popular press that chimpanzees working memory (WM) is comparable to, if not exceeding, that of humans. WM is a complex multidimensional construct with strong parallels in humans to prefrontal cortex and cognitive development. These parallel...

Previous research has shown that behavioural mimicry fosters affiliation, and can be used to infer whether people belong to the same social unit. However, we still know very little about the generalizability of these findings and the individual factors involved. The present study intends to disentangle two important variables and assess their impor...

The paper by Dr. Paul Kirchhoff addresses, as its title indicates, two major topics in kinship theory: (1) How do we account for the kinship terminologies that define and organize the kinship relations that provide the foundation for a society’s kinship system? and (2) How do we account for the marriage rules (whether positive or negative) that cre...

The evolution from pre-human primates to modern Homo sapiens is a complex one involving many domains, ranging from the material to the social to the cognitive, both at the individual and the community levels. This article focuses on a critical qualitative transition that took place during this evolution involving both the social and the cognitive d...

Extensive cooperation among biologically unrelated individuals is uniquely human. It would be surprising if this uniqueness were not related to other uniquely human characteristics, yet current theories of human cooperation tend to ignore the human aspects of human behavior. This paper presents a theory of cooperation that draws on social, cultural...

Comment of Alexey L. Eryomin on paper “Identity, Kinship, and the Evolution of Cooperation” by Voorhees, B., Read, D., Gabora, L.: "The relevance of cooperation and its evolution in the human population has been increasing quantitatively, as 2000 years ago there were 0.1 billion people on Earth, 100 years ago - 1 billion, by the middle of the twent...

Back to Kinship III is the third Special Issue of the e-journal, Structure and Dynamics sponsored by the group, Kinship Circle. Each issue is dedicated to current kinship research. The first two issues have both been very successful, as shown by the number of downloads. Back to Kinship I (Read and El Guindi 2013) has had a total of 2,696 download s...

Anthropological research has long established the central importance in human societies of the shared, conceptual systems of social relations we refer to as kinship systems in providing a foundation for culturally formulated systems of social interaction. Historically, and from an evolutionary perspective, kinship systems came into play even before...

Mathematical anthropology has as its raison d’être formally expressing models, ideas, and concepts developed by anthropologists so as to extend our understanding of human societies. When addressing cultural systems, the mathematical content of mathematical anthropology depends on which of two possible ways culture is understood to be constituted. O...

According to recent literature, correspondence analysis is the method of choice for frequency seriation. However, this does not consider the effects of data heterogeneity or typology on the orderings produced by this method. This relates to a more fundamental issue of how to evaluate the effects of heterogeneity and typology on seriation results, a...

Anthropological research has long established the central importance in human societies of the shared, conceptual systems of social relations we refer to as kinship systems in providing a foundation for culturally formulated systems of social interaction. Historically, and from an evolutionary perspective, kinship systems came into play even before...

We review issues stemming from current models regarding the drivers of cultural complexity and cultural evolution. We disagree with the implication of the treadmill model, based on dual-inheritance theory, that population size is the driver of cultural complexity. The treadmill model reduces the evolution of artifact complexity, measured by the num...

A major goal of archaeological classification is to arrange artifactual material in an orderly manner that provides a “window” opening onto the lifeway of a past group of people. A classification can give the archaeologist insight into the cultural framework of a past society. To do this, a classification must be rigorous, consistent, and replicabl...

Factor analysis (FA) is a statistical technique used to recognize, interpret, and model patterning in multivariate datasets. This technique applies to continuous measurement‐based data where the goal is to confirm a model that relates underlying factors as the drivers for the measurement values obtained over the dataset. A well‐known example of usi...

The authors begin on a good note by noting that species is the only taxonomic level with a definite biological foundation, namely the restricted ability of one species to successfully interbreed with another species. They then muddy their argument by accepting the use of the term species to designate morphological differences between one population...

Extensive cooperation among biologically unrelated individuals is uniquely human and much current research attempts to explain this fact. We draw upon social, cultural, and psychological aspects of human uniqueness to present an integrated theory of human cooperation that explains aspects of human cooperation that are problematic for other theories...

Kinship is a universal of human societies, built around systems of self‐centric, reciprocal social relations. In all societies, societal members are conceptually organized, to one degree or another, through structured, reciprocal systems of relations. Kinship systems are broad in their scope and interdigitate with religious, economic, political, an...

Copy and paste each of the five files to a text editor (e.g., TextEdit in MAC OSX) and save each as #FILENAME.csv, #Save as: BODOIN.csv a,

Encultured individuals see the behavioral rules of cultural systems of moral norms as objective. In addition to prescriptive regulation of behavior, moral norms provide templates, scripts, and scenarios regulating the expression of feelings and triggered emotions arising from perceptions of norm violation. These allow regulated defensive responses...

Hal Scheffler was one of the world’s great anthropologists and, without question, its foremost authority on human kinship. These considerations in themselves would be quite enough to merit a collection of essays in his memory, but his work also touches upon certain larger issues in our appreciation of the human condition, as well as current social...

A long-standing issue in kinship theory stems from the presence of kinship terminologies with kin terms having genealogical referents crosscutting, rather than following, the pattern for genealogical relations. The notion that the genealogical referents should be in agreement with genealogical relations arises from the assumption, going back to Lew...

The seven commentators, Thomas Trautmann, Peter Whiteley, Patrick McConvell, Patrick Heady, Franklin Tjon Sie Fat, Klaus Hamberger, and Mauro Barbosa de Almeida, provide wide ranging and important observations that go beyond the specifics of my text (http://mathematicalanthropology.org/Pdf/ReadMACT0118.pdf) and bring to the discussion important iss...

The goal of the paper is to show how the generative logic approach to kinship terminology structures sheds light on the basis for the skewing that characterizes the Crow-Omaha terminologies. The generative logic of the Omaha terminology of the Thonga-Ronga of southern Africa is examined in detail and the skewing in this terminology is found to occu...

Kinship matters for understanding society, culture and humankind, anthropology’s focus of concern. This session refocuses attention on kinship, a domain of human activity that has been theorized about from the beginning of anthropology as an academic discipline and has been foundational to anthropology as a field of study. A recent resurgence of re...

PPT version of updated October 2017 VCAS presnetation

On October 10th, 2017, Dr. Michael Merrill gave an invited presentation to the Ventura County Archaeological Society, which focused on the question, do different size modes of stones used to apply molten asphaltum to seal baskets correspond to different basket types that have distinct modes of opening diameter? If so, what size categories were sele...

The book’s goal is to view society as being like a game with rules that can be changed by the participants in the arena of politics. The book begins with a discussion of gene-culture evolution, which Gintis considers the answer to the question: “…man makes culture, but how does man thereby make himself?” (p. 1). However, what we want to understand...

A recent article argues that pure working memory in humans and chimpanzees have the same size. However, the data offered to support this claim show the opposite, namely that the size of pure working memory in chimpanzees is smaller than that of humans. In addition, extensive data show that the effective size of working memory in chimpanzees is much...

The elliptical Fourier representation provides a powerful way to mathematically represent a shape boundary, with goodness-of-fit limited only by the number of points used to represent the boundary and the number of terms included in the elliptical Fourier representation. The elliptical Fourier representation, though, has indeterminacies based on: (...

In response to climatic and other sources of environmental variation, individuals within a population may adjust their behavioral, morphological or physiological responses to varying environmental conditions through phenotypic plasticity. In seasonal environments, time constraints related to seasonality, as well as variation in climatic factors, ma...

Over the past 40 years, enormous progress has been made in morphometrics, following the shift from linear to geometric measurement systems, with the latter divided into two main approaches: representation of form using landmark point locations and representation of form using shape outlines. As is well known, the landmark representation of form has...

The two failed orientations to kinship, nurture and fitness, are transcended as this collection of original kinship work moves forward, building on the rich theoretical and ethnographic past of kinship study to a reinvigorated future of new data, reconceptualization of paradigms, fresh debates and new theory. Using kinship to anthropomorphize nonhu...

The two failed orientations to kinship, nurture and fitness, are transcended as this collection of original kinship work moves forward, building on the rich theoretical and ethnographic past of kinship study to a reinvigorated future of new data, reconceptualization of paradigms, fresh debates and new theory. Using kinship to anthropomorphize nonhu...

Marriage is not founded straightforwardly upon procreation. Rather, marriage is universally — not withstanding groups such as the Mosuo of China lacking institutionalized marriage — a contractual relationship legitimating a woman’s childbearing and giving her offspring social identity. While a child-bearing woman may simply take on the motherhood r...

Abstract: The elliptical Fourier representation provides a powerful way to mathematically represent a shape boundary, with goodness-of-fit limited only by the number of points used to represent the boundary and the number of terms included in the elliptical Fourier representation. The elliptical Fourier representation, though, has indeterminacies b...

The transition from subitizing to counting systems provides a test case for whether the role of culture in the transition from preexisting biologically grounded capacities to the cultural expression of those capacities is, on the one hand, essentially one of providing a community-shared overlay for an already existing biological capacity or, on the...

Among the drivers and constraints on the evolution of complex hominin culture that have been proposed throughout the years, demographic factors have been particularly persistent, and they have recently again come to gain traction in the literature in the shape of the so-called treadmill model. The treadmill model connects cultural complexity to gro...

We are pleased with the positive endorsement of our article by all of the commentators. This gives us the opportunity to expand our article in the directions that they introduce in their comments. We find it striking that all reach essentially the same point, although from a variety of directions: namely, that the models (formal and informal) aimed...

Richerson et al. propose cultural group selection (CGS) as the basis for understanding the evolution of cultural systems. Their proposal does not take into account the nature of cultural idea systems as being constituted at an organizational rather than an individual level. The sealing partners of the Netsilik Inuit exemplify the problem with their...

Reviews the book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich (see record 2016-18797-000 ). The book—which is written for a broad audience with wide-ranging accounts of our dependency on our cultural milieu—will be an eye opener for those who presume that huma...

The two failed orientations to kinship, nurture and fitness, are transcended as this collection of original kinship work moves forward, building on the rich theoretical and ethnographic past of kinship study to a reinvigorated future of new data, reconceptualization of paradigms, fresh debates and new theory. Using kinship to anthropomorphize nonhu...

Kinship involves social interactions and forms of social organization based on systems of culturally constructed social relations expressed linguistically through the kin terms constituting a kinship terminology. The organization and structure for these social relations expressed in a kinship terminology is formally modeled here as being part of an...

Kinship terminologies consist of the terms used to reference culturally recognized kinship relations between persons. These terms have been assumed to identify categories of genealogical relations (despite ethnographic evidence to the contrary), and kinship terminologies are classified using differences in genealogical referents of kin terms. Recen...

In recent work, culminating in the book Origins and Revolutions, Clive Gamble has suggested that we need to move away from a focus on the origin of individual, cognitive abilities of modern Homo sapiens towards the development of ‘an external cognitive architecture by which hominins achieved social extension within local groups and a wider communit...

A recent article argues that pure working memory in humans and chimpanzees have the same size. However, the data offered to support this claim show the opposite, namely that the size of pure working memory in chimpanzees is smaller than that of humans. In addition, extensive data show that the effective size of working memory in chimpanzees is much...

The goal of forming a science of intentional behavior requires a more richly detailed account of symbolic systems than is assumed by the authors. Cultural systems are not simply the equivalent in the ideational domain of culture of the purported Baldwin Effect in the genetic domain. How to Cite This Article Link to This Abstract Blog This Article...

Mithen describes our book, Human Thought and Social Organization, as unintelligible. Since a previous review by Bojka Milicic showed an excellent grasp of the full range of implications of the argument and another by Radu Umbres showed a good understanding of it, we are confident that Mithen's description is wrong as a matter of fact. In our reply...

A decade ago, Henrich proposed group size as a driver of cultural complexity. Derex et al now present experimental results they say support this ‘group size hypothesis’ by seemingly showing that larger groups perform better than smaller groups under imitation-based cultural evolution. Our reanalysis of their experimental data, however, shows that l...

In most, if not all, societies, incest taboos—perhaps the most universal of cultural taboos—include prohibitions on marriage between parent and child or between siblings. This universality suggests a biological origin, yet the considerable variation across societies in the full range of prohibited marriage relations implies a cultural origin. Corre...

Models of cultural evolution need to address not only the organizational aspects of human societies, but also the complexity and structure of cultural idea systems that frame their systems of organization. These cultural idea systems determine a framework within which behaviors take place and provide mutually understood meanings for behavior from t...

Comment on "Kinship, Theology and Deep Grammar," a blog by Car-los Salazar, published through the International Cognition and Cul-ture Institute, London School of Economics and Institut Nicod (http://www.cognitionandculture.net/home/blog/80-carles-salazar-s-blog/2614-kinship-theology-and-deep-grammar) Dwight Read Wednesday, 21 May 2014 06:19 As I d...

The claim that extant terminologies are optimal solutions in a space of all possible terminologies depends on invalidly assuming any partition of a set of genealogical relations is a possible kinship terminology. Instead, kinship terminologies have a particular type of logical/formal structure that is generative with categories providing for classi...

Kinship systems are conceptually grounded in culturally formulated idea-systems we refer to as kinship terminologies and through which the boundaries, form and structure of human social systems are culturally constituted. A terminology, contrary to a long-standing assumption in anthropology, is not based on a prior categorization of genealogical re...

Whereas the modern synthesis focused primarily on gene evolution through mutation, inheritance, and natural selection, the expanded synthesis has focused on endogenous processes affecting the development and expression of traits, not just their selection as optimal solutions to externally imposed change. The authors suggest that accounts of cultura...

Despite claims to the contrary, all data on food procurers such as hunter-gathers and subsistence fishers show no relationship between population size and tool complexity. The same is not true for food producers.

The experimental results presented by the authors say less about the assumption that “similarity of shape is … an indicator of cultural … similarity” than the authors believe. Rather than introducing caution as the authors suggest, their experiment actually provides further evidence for the validity of the assumption culturally shared target shape...

Our approach to cognitive study goes beyond how “people construe their world by the way they talk about it”. Rather, it focuses on how human knowledge is expressed through complex, universal processes of categorizing and re-categorizing, manifested in various humsn domains such as kinship, ritual, space, time, etc. We argue that there can be no cog...

A key change in the evolution of our species from a common ancestor with the chimpanzees was the shift to a field of social interaction no longer dependent upon face-to-face interaction for the maintenance of social coherency. Our hunter-gatherers ancestors made a radical shift to social relations based on a culturally constructed system of kinship...