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Evolution without Inheritance: Steps to an Ecology of Learning
... To achieve a wide range of purposes in a dynamic context requires learning how to actively explore the constraints and opportunities offered by the environment that change continuously, without which stable intergenerational recurrence of community-specific handicrafts would not have been realized. As some authors rightly pointed out (19,40), the description of humans in cultural evolutionary theories has often been very "thin"-they imitate the behavior of others, which could be biased in a few simple ways, plus random mutations. But in reality, a mental library of behavioral solutions acquired by faithful imitation of others' behavior may not be viable, simply because each one of us lives with a unique body-in-an-environment. ...
... By highlighting potter idiosyncrasies in vessel morphogenesis which are socially patterned, our study adds to the growing realization that we should explore theories that assign greater complexity to individual humans, as this is necessary for providing thorough explanations of skill learning and craftsmanship (41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46)(47). We further stress that the factors that affect group-specific habits of practice need not be confined within human brains, but they can be distributed throughout the whole system of relations constituted by the presence of a person with others in her/his ordinary environment, which relate indirectly to the reliable canalization of the development and behavior of individuals under normal circumstances (40). In this view, seemingly contradictory results of the coexistence of idiosyncratic fashion styles by individual potters and community-specific deviations of morphological features of vessels may not be contradictory after all, but rather an inevitable outcome arising from the underlying mechanism of sharing of embodied skills in an eventful environment. ...
Pottery is a quintessential indicator of human cultural dynamics. Cultural alignment of behavioral repertoires and artifacts has been considered to rest upon two distinct dynamics: selective transmission of information and culture-specific biased transformation. In a cross-cultural field experiment, we tested whether community-specific morphological features of ceramic vessels would arise when the same unfamiliar shapes were reproduced by professional potters from three different communities who threw vessels using wheels. We analyzed the details of the underlying morphogenesis development of vessels in wheel throwing. When expert potters from three different communities of practice were instructed to faithfully reproduce common unfamiliar model shapes that were not parts of the daily repertoires, the morphometric variation in the final shape was not random; rather, different potters produced vessels with more morphometric variation among than within communities, indicating the presence of community-specific deviations of morphological features of vessels. Furthermore, this was found both in the final shape and in the underlying process of morphogenesis; there was more variation in the morphogenetic path among than within communities. These results suggest that the morphological features of ceramic vessels produced by potters reliably and nonrandomly diverge among different communities. The present study provides empirical evidence that collective alignment of morphological features of ceramic vessels can arise from the community-specific habits of fashioning clay.
... The human niche is the spatial and social sphere that includes the structural ecologies (including other species), social partners, and the larger local groups/populations of humans (Fuentes 2016). But for the genus Homo, at least since the mid-to later-Pleistocene, the niches occupied, structured and interacted with also include perceptual, and conceptual, contexts of human individuals and communities-the ways in which the structural and social relationships are perceived and expressed via behavioral, semiotic, and material aspects of the human experience (e.g., Deacon 1997Deacon , 2016Fuentes 2014Fuentes , 2015Kuhn 2014;Kissel and Fuentes 2018;Peterson et al. 2018Peterson et al. , 2021Rosanno 200;Sterelny 2021, see also Ingold 2022). These dynamic human niches are the context for the lived experience of members of the genus Homo and their communities, where "kinship" and social and ecological histories are shared and lived, where members of the genus Homo created and participated in shared knowledge, social and structural security, and development across the lifespan. ...
Part of the task in studying human evolution is developing a deep understanding of what we share, and do not share, with other life, as a mammal, a primate, a hominin, and as members of the genus Homo. A key aspect of this last facet is gained via the examination of the genus Homo across the Pleistocene. By at least the later Pleistocene members of the genus Homo began to habitually insert shared meaning into and onto their world forming one of the bases of contemporary human abilities to develop a distinctive human niche and human culture. Meaning‐laden cultural dynamics constitute the core of a ubiquitous semiotic ecosystem, which in turn structures the architecture of the complex niches and niche construction processes that characterize humanity today. Here, I offer a summary of Pleistocene evolution of the genus Homo and an argument for when and how that extensive and distinctive capacities for shared meaning‐making and a particularly dynamic niche construction emerged.
... In cooperative learning, divided groups first do subtasks individually and independently intending to get a solution and the final solution is created by combining all the previous solutions of different groups (Kaendler et al., 2015). Through the process of collaborative learning, cooperation can also help collaboration, here collaboration becomes not only a combination of the fragments begotten from cooperation, as well it means more than the integration (Ingold, 2022). Mahmoudi and Ghafournia (2016) observe that collaborative and cooperative learning instigates a varied range of activities which may create attraction to learners to work in groups through games, playing roles, or performing in dramas. ...
RIMEJE is a yearly publication intended to be published in June each
year. It was expected that teacher educators, secondary teachers, Master of Education students, and others striving for quality education would engage themselves in creating and disseminating new knowledge in the field of education. The current volume of the journal contains eight articles. It was a
huge challenge to collect quality articles, provide the authors with feedback,
and finally to edit making them eligible for publication. The editorial team
deserves special thanks for their relentless hard work to make the
publication possible. The Executive Editor, Dr Sheikh Shahbaz Riad, did a
lot in refining the articles to publish in the journal. I would like to extend
my heart-felt gratitude to all the researchers for submitting their articles.
... In cooperative learning, divided groups first do subtasks individually and independently intending to get a solution and the final solution is created by combining all the previous solutions of different groups (Kaendler et al., 2015). Through the process of collaborative learning, cooperation can also help collaboration, here collaboration becomes not only a combination of the fragments begotten from cooperation, as well it means more than the integration (Ingold, 2022). Mahmoudi and Ghafournia (2016) observe that collaborative and cooperative learning instigates a varied range of activities which may create attraction to learners to work in groups through games, playing roles, or performing in dramas. ...
... Another particularly powerful attempt is by anthropologist Tim Ingold in his article Evolution without Inheritance: Steps to an Ecology of Learning (Ingold, 2022). Ingold notes: "Attempts to integrate human culture, history, or symbolic imagination into a comprehensive theory of evolution have, up to now, foundered on a bifurcation between mind and nature deeply embedded in the project of modern science. ...
Phenomenology, particularly as developed by Merleau-Ponty, primarily concerns how human beings perceive and act towards the world they encounter, their lifeworld. Umwelt theory, by contrast, primarily concerns the animal lifeworld, which is also the concern of Biosemiotics. Exploring the overlap between the two disciplines requires a fuller understanding of how human perception has evolved to become so very different from that of animals. This article will try to provide that and show how that may help to address the ecological crisis surrounding us. Human beings now develop and live in in a world where most of what they encounter are cultural artefacts. In fact, as Simondon suggests, human beings and technological objects are co-evolving. This has brought about radical changes in the way we relate to the natural world. But these are not necessarily changes for the better. Indeed, McGilchrist claims that the last thousand years or so of cultural evolution has profoundly impaired how human beings attend to the world. This paper will suggest that this impairment has contributed to the ecological crisis we now face, and that to help meet it both Biosemiotics and Umwelt theory should take more account of the revival of interest in panpsychism as seen in the work of Goff and others.
... This existence is shaped by belief systems, social practices, history, symbolic imagination, technologies, language, and the general cultural environment. Such divisions can be transcended through practice and learning [48]. ...
This article, set within an art–science collaborative framework, exposes a multidisciplinary research platform aimed at identifying new relationships with hops (Humulus lupulus), its harvest, and local memory. It presents an ecological and ethnobotanical study of the plant, from its natural habitat to its past/present cultivation, its traditional uses, and possible applications in pharmacy and cosmetics. It offers a qualitative study with an ethnographic approach to participant observation, using techniques such as in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and life stories. Finally, it brings forth a process of material experimentation from the arts, based on rethinking waste systems to create new biomaterials with manifold future applications. The results from this hybrid methodology show the multiple possibilities that the plant offers beyond its cultivation for the brewing industry. Likewise, it shows how spaces, relationships, and dialogues have been generated with wide repercussions on a local and planetary scale, related to the sustainability of the rural world and territorial cohesion, all of which are intrinsic to emergent agrarian practices. The conclusions show a complex scenario that demands a hybrid response to understand the paradoxes to which the plant is subjected and the uncertain future of agrarian culture.
... However, because scholars (especially transcendentalists) misunderstood this overall process and confused the "part for the whole", there emerged "an undue emphasis upon a relatively small number of acts which are presented without due regard to the conditions which made them possible, and to a concept of change at infrequent intervals in units of great magnitude." For Usher, cumulative synthesis involves all the steps found in the emergence of any individual innovation, which in turn sets the stage for other actors to "reproduce" (Ingold, 2019) (Figure 22.1b). Many tend to ignore or dismiss the intermediary steps and innovations, which in the grand scheme of the overall process play an important role in generating discontinuous innovations. ...
Organizational change and innovation are central and enduring issues in management theory and practice. The need to understand processes of organization change and innovation has never been greater in order to respond to dramatic changes in population demographics, technology, stakeholder needs, competitive survival, and social, economic, environmental, health, and sustainability concerns. These concerns call for a better understanding of managing organization change and innovation. Why and what organizations change is generally well known; how organizations change is the central focus of this handbook. It focuses on processes of change, or the sequence of events in which organizational characteristics and activities change and develop over time, and the factors that influence these processes, with the organization as the central unit of analysis. Across the diverse and wide-ranging contributions, three central questions evolve: what is the nature of change and process; what are the key concepts and models for understanding organization change and innovation; and how we should study change and innovation. This handbook presents critical evolving scholarship and explores its implications for future research and practice on organizational change and innovation.
... Humans are specialized in niche construction, as they count on culture as the main strategy. This has long been recognized in archaeology, both explicitly ( [22,23], among others) and implicitly under different terminologies, such as the 'transmitted environment' by Boyd & Richerson ([24], also see [25])-see Ingold [26] for a different approach to learning as an intergenerational life process. By accounting for the material record of human behaviours, archaeology can help understand the contexts and relationships within which they have taken place [27]. ...
In this paper, we argue for the inclusion of archaeology in discussions about how humans have contributed to and dealt with climate change, especially in the long term. We suggest Niche Construction Theory as a suitable framework to that end. In order to take into account both human and environmental variability, we also advocate for a situated perspective that includes the Global South as a source of knowledge production, and the Neotropics as a relevant case study to consider. To illustrate this, we review the mid-Holocene Hypsithermal period in the southern Puna and continental Patagonia, both in southern South America, by assessing the challenges posed by this climate period and the archaeological signatures of the time from a Niche Construction Theory perspective. Finally, we emphasize the importance of these considerations for policymaking.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture’.
... As a carrier of traditional culture, traditional villages carry the memories of villagers who have been living there for generations. A certain way of life in the past does not disappear with the disappearance of the organism, but continues to exist in the environment (Ingold, 2022). One part of these memories is about the unique production and life style of rural areas, while the other part is the gradually internalized ideas and cognitive habits, which are the direct condensation and embodiment of the rural culture (Yang & Su, 2014). ...
Many traditional villages promote cultural inheritance by developing tourism, and thus develop into tourism-oriented traditional villages (TOTVs). The key to their sustainable development lies in balancing cultural inheritance and tourism development. Based on memory theory, we constructed a comprehensive evaluation system to measure the cultural inheritance level (CIL). Moreover, taking 16 typical TOTVs in Beijing, China as examples, we evaluated their CIL by using the hierarchical-entropy weight model and the weighted TOPSIS model. The results show that the comprehensive evaluation method of CIL of TOTVs constructed in this paper has strong applicability. The comprehensive CIL values in the case villages vary considerably, and the scores of three dimensions show typical characteristics of great differentiation and imbalance. In addition, we summarized four paths for improving the CIL. This study will help promote the scientific inheritance and utilization of TOTVs, as well as their sustainable development, and will help realize rural revitalization.
... The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis also extends the role of biosemiotics. This paper will seek to extend it further, both to the metaphysics of C. S. Peirce and A. N Whitehead and to Ingold's treatment of inheritance (Ingold, 2022). ...
Enhancing the central role of Brainwaves in Neuroscience and Biosemiotics
... Undoubtedly, animal symbols are diachronically found in all human cultures, suggesting not only the importance of their symbolic value, but also the need to integrate the main animals' symbolic content -instinct -in our existence. Physical or biological anthropologists tried to understand human distinctiveness bearing well in mind that humans are animals, so they devoted their interests first to anatomy, then to physiology, genetics, and lately to cognition to understand how they influence behaviors, considering animals as a sort of "primitive" plot outline (for an exhaustive overview of historical writings see Regan and Singer [36], while for a wonderful revision of the evolutionary ideas see Ingold [37]). Recently, the idea that humans are well distinct from animals (because of their possibility to communicate in a complex way thanks to language and symbols) has been picked on multiple times, and this is conducive to new paradigms [38,39,40,41,42]. ...
The reasoning about the right and wrong ways to consider, use and treat animals is the focus of animal ethics. For a long time, animal rights have largely escaped anthropological attention. Only recently, however, thanks to new perspectives its assignment is to go beyond the human. This is because we must change the inner assumptions of our basic concepts on human and non-human ethics if we want to deconstruct the human/animal dichotomy. The author reflects on the different theories currently found in literature and the fact that none of them expressed so far are completely accepted, probably due to the different dispositions towards the term ethics. Some of the various theoretical alternatives recently proposed by Authors belonging to different disciplines are discussed in the paper.
... The tractor was emblematic of Andy as a farmer. The farmer in him reminds us of Tim Ingold's (2019) insight: ...
In this short paper we recognize and celebrate the life and contributions of Andy Van de Ven, a renowned professor at the University of Minnesota and a former president of the Academy of Management. Andy published in JABS multiple times over his career and was a longtime member of its editorial board. His work was exemplary for many things, including his formulation of engaged scholarship, his creativity, his multiple innovations in theory and practice, and the ways he inspired so many others. Without him the Academy, writ large, would have been much poorer.
... His aim is the comprehension of the natural and cultural dimensions within one single movement, which he sometimes calls the "flow of life" (Ingold, 1986: 118), indistinctly social and biological. Ingold oscillates between killing off neo-Darwinism -"Neo-Darwinism is dead" he writes (Ingold, 2013b: 1)decreeing the end of a paradigm, and salvaging it by transforming Darwin's narrative into a "discovery" (Ingold, 2019) and criticizing the metaphors used by the geneticists and themselves for misunderstanding the process of natural selection, claiming that they fail to pay proper attention to key aspects of the theory. ...
The article explores a change taking place today in the fields of biology and social anthropology, signaling a shared desire to transcend the heuristic effects of the opposition between nature and culture. Acceptance of the idea that random mutations are the sole driving force behind the process of natural selection overlooks the agentive capacity of non-human living beings, revealing an anthropocentric inspiration. To critique the rhetoric surrounding the principle of natural selection, I turn to the anthropology of Tim Ingold and his analysis of the metaphors that illustrate the principle. I disagree with the author, however, when he argues that these metaphors do not adequately illustrate neo-Darwinian premises. Instead, I believe that they are faithful since their apparent contradiction expresses the unease of neo-Darwinian theory itself when it combines randomness and teleology. New currents in biology, such as biosemiotics, attribute evolutionary importance to epigenetic changes. From the evolutionary perspective, they also highlight the importance of recognizing that the entire lived world possesses the capacity for agency, not just human beings. Within social anthropology, the so-called ontological turn and multispecies ethnography have been working with a new conception of the person, extendible to non-human beings, including the latter to compose a single collective with humans. Thus we can observe an attempt on the part of biologists and anthropologists alike to move beyond anthropocentrism, producer and product of the opposition between nature and culture.
American archaeology has long been focused on reconstructing past cultures through the description and chronological ordering of items found in the archaeological record. This goal was most evident starting in the early 20th century through what became known as culture history, which in retrospect produced results based on common sense and ethnographic analogues rather than on formal theory. By the mid-1930s, some culture historians realized the lack of testability in their conclusions and began exploring Darwinian evolutionary theory as an alternative. However, their efforts were often ignored or ridiculed, and it wasn't until the early 1980s that evolutionary theory and associated methods began to play significant roles in archaeology. This acceptance grew from the development of a genetics-based theory of cultural transmission and the introduction of phylogenetic methods into anthropology and archaeology. These methods offered the necessary means for distinguishing between simple historical continuity-one thing following another chronologically-and heritable continuity how one thing is related to another in terms of descent. Two concepts that play key roles in the reconstruction of cultural phylogenies are tradition and lineage, the former representing patterns of phylogenetic relationship and the latter patterns of genealogical descent.
Pastoralist groups in East Africa inhabit arid and semi-arid lands, historically sustaining their livelihoods through high mobility of both herds and humans. They flexibly adopt other subsistence strategies to overcome spatiotemporal difficulties. Rich ethnographic documentation on these groups frequently mentions children, highlighting the significant roles that children play in local labor division and their contribution to family subsistence and positive changes in their societies. This chapter provides an overview of Maasailand, its social institutions, and local livelihood changes. By reviewing existing studies on pastoralist groups in East Africa, the chapter also outlines the parenting ethnotheories and practices commonly observed in these groups as well as local positioning of childhood and child development within these evolving contexts.
Cultural inheritance is a central issue in archaeology. If variation were not inherited, cultures could not evolve. Some archaeologists have dismissed cultural evolutionary theory in general, and the significance of inheritance specifically, substituting instead a view of culture change that results from agency and intentionality amid a range of options in terms of social identity, cultural values and behaviours. This emphasis projects the modern academic imagination onto the past. Much of the archaeological record, however, is consistent with an intergenerational inheritance process in which cultural traditions were the defining characteristics of behaviour.
We appreciate the respondents’ comments on our debate article ‘Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions’ (Bentley & O'Brien 2024). We all agree that traditional cultural practices—such as manufacturing Acheulean handaxes—often take considerable amounts of time to learn; as Gladwell (2008) popularly proposed, it takes 10 000 hours of practice to make an expert. We also appear to agree that cultural practices are intergenerational. As Frieman (2024: 1421) notes, ideas and practices persist because they are “valued, recreated, manipulated, instrumentalised and enacted generation after generation”; and as Ingold (2024: 1417) puts it, traditional tasks “are not subject to the free will of the individual but fall upon practitioners as part of their responsibilities” to their communities. Drawing on the practice of Bronze Age metallurgy, Pollard (2024) asks the million-dollar questions: how does innovation occur, and what causes it? As both Prentiss (2024) and Pollard note, for example, the pace of technological change is often punctuated, an observation common across the natural and social sciences, but one that defies easy explanation (e.g. Duran-Nebreda et al . 2024; O'Brien et al . 2024).
Concepts of an organism’s biological environment and of niche construction as how organisms alter their environment and that of other organisms now play prominent roles in multiple sub-fields of biology, including ecology, evolution, and development. Some philosophers now use these concepts to understand the dynamics of scientific research. Others note divergences among the concepts of niche and niche construction employed in these biological fields, with implications for their possible conceptual integration. My (Rouse, 2015) account of scientific research as niche constructive and of laws and lawful invariance in scientific practice illuminates these conceptual differences and their implications for integrating those domains of biological research in two ways. First, it accounts for the partial autonomy of these domains and their concepts as characteristic of scientific conceptual development. Second, it provides a more complex understanding of how research domains can be integrated, which shows how those different conceptions of niches and niche construction do not block their appropriate integration. The conclusion situates my account and its application to niche concepts both amid other philosophical uses of niche concepts to understand research environments and as exemplifying my revisionist conception of philosophical naturalism.
Humans learn in ways that are influenced by others. As a result, cultural items of many types are elaborated over time in ways that build on the achievements of previous generations. Culture therefore shows a pattern of descent with modification reminiscent of Darwinian evolution. This raises the question of whether cultural selection-a mechanism akin to natural selection, albeit working when learned items are passed from demonstrators to observers-can explain how various practices are refined over time. This Element argues that cultural selection is not necessary for the explanation of cultural adaptation; it shows how to build hybrid explanations that draw on aspects of cultural selection and cultural attraction theory; it shows how cultural reproduction makes problems for highly formalised approaches to cultural selection; and it uses a case-study to demonstrate the importance of human agency for cumulative cultural adaptation.
This chapter presents the argument that moving from disembodied rationality to embodied reason to study economic life requires connecting perception, cognition, and action; coupling organism and environment; and overcoming the opposition between rationality and emotion. This links the theoretical and empirical literature on embodiment to economists such as Smith and Keynes. The role of metaphor, conceptual blending, language, artifacts, and habitus in the making of the self and economic life is highlighted. In doing so, the “Hayek paradox” is resolved by showing that abstraction is not opposed to embodiment but enabled by it, and, in contrast to behavioral and experimental economics, embodiment is not portrayed as a source of disturbances to (market-based) rationality posited by a disembodied normative standard. The chapter proposes the dialectic of inward and outward embodiment as a fundamental principle of embodied reason, and traces it back to Hegelian philosophy to ground the theory of economic agency and institutional action.
The concept of actor is a radical alternative to the rational economic agent, based on two embodied notions: Autonomy, which refers to capabilities of self-determination and flourishing; and feelings, which ground valuation as enabling reasonable action. In this chapter the person is viewed as developmentally and historically unfolding, embedded in social relations, in the Hegelian tradition. Agency is analyzed in terms of the conceptual triad of recognition, inward and outward embodiment, and is distributed in assemblages of actors and artifacts. These assemblages underpin the potential “We-mode” of action as well as agential powers experienced as feelings, such as trust in the context of markets. Agency is further elaborated with Sen’s notions of capabilities and functionings, and complemented by identity expressed through narratives and memories shared with others. In sum, the reasonable person in the economy is the actor (as different from agent), who experiences feelings, seeks to flourish in autonomy, and whose reasons for action are mutually recognized by others.
In this article, we explore the notion of legacy through the ways graziers in Outback Queensland, Australia, draw on material, narrative, and embodied traces of past ‘events’ to emplot their lives during times of uncertainty. Through an ethnography of pastoral work and storytelling on stations, or ranches, we show how settler‐colonial narratives of the frontier and legacy circulate as affective forces in pastoralists' daily lives and become embodied through labour. We argue that pastoral families respond to both the failure of modernist grand narratives and more personal events by renegotiating stories of the frontier to legitimate their ongoing presence in Outback Australia and give meaning to their lives. While these narratives are existentially useful for pastoralists, we argue that they remain tied to exclusionary and unsustainable structures and ideologies that prevent pastoralists from adjusting to contemporary crises.
Mleko je izhodišče raziskovanja intenzivnih sonastajanj različnih teles, vrst in stvari; tega, kar običajno imenujejo udomačitev. Mleko je del skupka, ki povezuje živali, hormone, encime, bakterije, hrano, gene, tehnologije in materialno kulturo. Ta kompleksna sonastajanja producirajo nove, nepričakovane rezultate in učinke ter spreminjajo vse komponente v skupku udomačitve.
Many emergencies in the world are not perceived to be the cause of spontaneous human behavioural change. Drawing from a cultural anthropology perspective, this chapter explores the perception of the limits in the Western cultural world and argues that COVID-19 must be understood in the development of concomitant emergencies (co-emergencies), and for the way, humans have adapted in similar situations of urgency and adapted solutions to face them. In a post-humanistic dimension, the solutions to face the COVID-19 pandemic are indeed recurrent to the human adaptation to past emergencies. The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a human behavioural change that limited the risk of a contagious virus. This simplification is part of “a new normal” that deals with the nexus between human perception of nature and an emerging governance of the economy. The chapter concludes that in a post-pandemic new normal we need to pave attention to the relationships between humans and non-humans to develop a capacity to act and react to multiple emergencies while reducing complexity.KeywordsNatural economyPost-humanismSocialization of emergenciesAnthropology of sustainability
Anthropological expeditions seeking out algorithms frequently return empty-handed. They are confronted with the challenge of the object: what to study when studying algorithms? In this article, I draw together a number of literatures to outline one possible answer to the question of how to study algorithms in social science. I argue that what we should study are algorithmic ecologies. I sketch five modalities of algorithmic ecologies and review concomitant literatures: ( a) imaginaries, ( b) infrastructures, ( c) interfaces, ( d) identities, and ( e) investments and interests. The speculative propositions offered here are that algorithms are immanent to ecologies and that they are enacted across all the modalities of algorithmic ecologies.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 52 is October 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
It seems, Humanity is in danger, increasingly threatened by recurrent epidemics and climatic disruptions. And Authority might not just not prevent it but aggravate it, through unsustainable theories and practices in the Pursuit of Salvation.
Among those who are cautious, critical or, even, overtly opposed to such conceptions, however, one can find everyday gestures of attention and care, with which to fray the limits of Catastrophe into sustainable ecologies of health and habitation.
Success in academic archaeology is strongly influenced by the publication of peer-reviewed articles. Despite the importance of such articles, minimal research has explicitly examined the factors influencing publishing decisions in archaeology. In order to better understand the landscape of archaeological publishing, we distributed a short survey that solicited basic professional and demographic information before asking respondents to (1) identify journals that publish important archaeological research, (2) identify journals that people who read archaeological academic CVs value most highly, and (3) rank the factors that affected their decisions about where to submit an article for publication. Our results from 274 respondents generated a list of 167 individual journal titles. Prestige was viewed as the most important factor that affected publishing decisions, followed by audience and open access considerations. There was no relationship between respondent-generated journal rankings and SCImago Journal Ranks (SJR), but there were significant differences in average SJR by gender and career stage. Responses showed consensus on only a small number of highly ranked archaeology and science-subject journals, with little agreement on the importance of most other journals. We conclude by highlighting the areas of disciplinary consensus and divergence revealed by the survey and by discussing how implicit prestige hierarchies permeate academic archaeology.
A central tenet of niche construction (NC) theory is that organisms can alter their environments in heritable and evolutionarily important ways, often altering selection pressures. We suggest that the physical changes niche constructors make to their environments may also alter trait heritability and the response of phenotypes to selection. This effect might change evolution, over and above the effect of NC acting via selection alone. We develop models of trait evolution that allow us to partition the effects of NC on trait heritability from those on selection to better investigate their distinct effects. We show that the response of a phenotype to selection and so the pace of phenotypic change can be considerably altered in the presence of NC and that this effect is compounded when trans-generational interactions are included. We argue that novel mathematical approaches are needed to describe the simultaneous effects of NC on trait evolution via selection and heritability. Just as indirect genetic effects have been shown to significantly increase trait heritability, the effects of NC on heritability in our model suggest a need for further theoretical development of the concept of heritability.
Humans have a prolonged childhood, which begins with an immature developmental state at birth. We take care of these helpless infants through a variety of cultural adaptations, including material culture, provisioning of food, and shared child care. Our species has long been characterized as having secondary altriciality, but an examination of human life history shows that we are fundamentally precocial, despite seeming helpless at birth. Human babies are also relatively large and overall require substantial attention and energy from caregivers. Previous work has focused on how culture permits us to give birth to helpless young and how our cultural adaptation solves problems stemming from encephalization. The birth of these dependent, costly creatures poses challenges but also creates opportunities by enhancing the development of social and emotional relationships with caregivers as well as language acquisition and enculturation.
The process of human adaptation to novel environments is a uniquely complex interplay between cultural and genetic changes. However, mechanistically, we understand little about these processes. To begin to untangle these threads of human adaptation we use mathematical models to describe and investigate cultural selective sweeps. We show that cultural sweeps differ in important ways from the genetic equivalents. The models show that the dynamics of cultural selective sweeps and, consequently, their differences from genetic sweeps depend critically on cultural transmission mechanisms. Further, we consider the effect of processes unique to culture such as foresight and innovations in response to an environmental change on adaptation. Finally we show that a ‘cultural evolutionary rescue’, or the survival of an endangered population by means of cultural adaptation, is possible. We suggest that culture might make a true, genetic, evolutionary rescue plausible for human populations.
Developmental plasticity looks like a promising bridge between ecological and developmental perspectives on evolution. Yet, there is no consensus on whether plasticity is part of the explanation for adaptive evolution or an optional "add-on" to genes and natural selection. Here, we suggest that these differences in opinion are caused by differences in the simplifying assumptions, and particular idealizations, that enable evolutionary explanation. We outline why idealizations designed to explain evolution through natural selection prevent an understanding of the role of development, and vice versa. We show that representing plasticity as a reaction norm conforms with the idealizations of selective explanations, which can give the false impression that plasticity has no explanatory power for adaptive evolution. Finally, we use examples to illustrate why evolutionary explanations that include developmental plasticity may in fact be more satisfactory than explanations that solely refer to genes and natural selection.
This article proposes a twenty-first-century anthropology of learning: comparative, integrating, powerful, speaking truth to power, and engaging in ethnographic, humanistic, and scientific investigation. Such an enterprise welcomes a wide variety of methods. An anthropology of learning includes—but distinguishes—education, socialization, enculturation, and schooling. It encompasses formal, informal, and nonformal learning. It grapples with definitions of learning and emphasizes that these are part of every human experience. Some learning happens in schools; only some of the learning matches what is explicitly intended. Sometimes learning is fostered by teaching, but pedagogy is not always required. Anthropology is an ideal discipline for investigating learning, education, and schooling—but these topics are not widely known in the field in general. The article proposes three centers of attention and provides an extended example, the “thirty-million-word gap.” [learning, schooling, education, word gap].
Human populations show rich cultural diversity. Underpinning this diversity of tools, rituals, and cultural norms are complex interactions between cultural evolutionary and demographic processes. Most models of cultural change assume that individuals use the same learning modes and methods throughout their lives. However, empirical data on ‘learning life histories’—the balance of dominant modes of learning (for example, learning from parents, peers, or unrelated elders) throughout an individual’s lifetime—suggest that age structure may play a crucial role in determining learning modes and cultural evolutionary trajectories. Thus, studied in isolation, demographic and cultural evolutionary models show only part of the picture. This paper describes a mathematical and computational framework that combines demographic and cultural evolutionary methods. Using this general framework, we examine interactions between the ways in which culture is spread throughout an individual’s lifetime and cultural change across generations. We show that including demographic structure alongside cultural dynamics can help to explain domain-specific patterns of cultural evolution that are a persistent feature of cultural data, and can shed new light on rare but significant demographic events.
We examine the possibility of shifting the concept of choice to the centre of the semiotic theory of learning. Thus, we define sign process (meaning-making) through the concept of choice: semiosis is the process of making choices between simultaneously provided options. We define semiotic learning as leaving traces by choices, while these traces influence further choices. We term such traces of choices memory. Further modification of these traces (constraints) will be called habituation. Organic needs are homeostatic mechanisms coupled with choice-making. Needs and habits result in motivatedness. Semiosis as choice-making can be seen as a complementary description of the Peircean triadic model of semiosis; however, this can fit also the models of meaning-making worked out in other shools of semiotics. We also provide a sketch for a joint typology of semiosis and learning.
The explanatory value of niche construction can be strengthened by firm footing in semiotic theory. Anthropologists have a unique perspective on the integration of such diverse approaches to human action and evolutionary processes. Here, we seek to open a dialogue between anthropology and biosemiotics. The overarching aim of this paper is to demonstrate that niche construction, including the underlying mechanism of reciprocal causation, is a semiotic process relating to biological development (sensu stricto) as well as cognitive development and cultural change. In making this argument we emphasize the semiotic mechanisms underlying the niche concept. We argue that the “niche” in ecology and evolutionary biology can be consistent with the Umwelt of Jakob von Uexkull. Following John Deely we therefore suggest that investigations into the organism—environment interface constituting niche construction should emphasize the semiotic basis of experience. Peircean signs are pervasive and allow for flexible interpretations of phenomena in relation to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of the behaving organism, which is particularly pertinent for understanding the relation of proximate/ultimate selective forces as co-productive (i.e., reciprocal). Additionally, theoretical work by Kinji Imanishi on the evolution of daily life and Gregory Bateson’s relational view of evolution both support the linkage between proximate and ultimate evolutionary processes of causation necessitated by the niche construction perspective. We will then apply this theoretical framework to two specific examples: 1) hominin evolution, including uniquely human cultural behaviors with niche constructive implications; and 2) the multispecies and anthropocentric niche of human-dog coevolution from which complex cognitive capacities and semiotic relationships emerged. The intended outcome of this paper is the establishment of concrete semiotic mechanisms and theory underlying niche constructive behavior which can then be applied to a broad spectrum of organisms to contextualize the reciprocal relation between proximate and ultimate drivers of behavior.
The Aboriginal cultural traditions of Australia, their histories, philosophies and characteristics, have fascinated and intrigued European observers and scholars for a very long time. This paper explores some implications of recent ethnographic information and engagements related to the themes of Indigenous rock art, knowledge and the understanding of Country in the Kimberley region, Western Australia, for the interpretation of archaeological evidence. It is argued that the Aboriginal understanding of cultural features and practices, rock art and the natural environment is best described within a framework of relational ontology. This orientation has important consequences for the conceptualization of a range of interrelated key themes, most importantly ‘space and place’, ‘story and narrative’ and ‘knowledge and representation’. Thus, the paper calls for the development of opportunities of intellectual engagement and exchange as well as collaborative and creative responses, which should also include new forms of expression in academic contexts that themselves reflexively engage with the limitations of writing and representation.
Niche construction is a process through which organisms alter their environments and, in doing so, influence or change the selective pressures to which they are subject. ‘Cultural niche construction’ refers specifically to the effect of cultural traits on the selective environments of other biological or cultural traits and may be especially important in human evolution. In addition, the relationship between population size and cultural accumulation has been the subject of extensive debate, in part because anthropological studies have demonstrated a significant association between population size and toolkit complexity in only a subset of studied cultures. Here, we review the role of cultural innovation in constructing human evolutionary niches and introduce a new model to describe the accumulation of human cultural traits that incorporates the effects of cultural niche construction. We consider the results of this model in light of available data on human toolkit sizes across populations to help elucidate the important differences between food-gathering societies and food-producing societies, in which niche construction may be a more potent force. These results support the idea that a population's relationship with its environment, represented here by cultural niche construction, should be considered alongside population size in studies of cultural complexity.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies’.
This essay – a collection of contributions from 10 scholars working in the field of biosemiotics and the humanities – considers nature in culture. It frames this by asking the question ‘Why does biosemiotics need the humanities?’. Each author writes from the background of their own disciplinary perspective in order to throw light upon their interdisciplinary engagement with biosemiotics. We start with Donald Favareau, whose originary disciplinary home is ethnomethodology and linguistics, and then move on to Paul Cobley’s contribution on general semiotics and Kalevi Kull’s on biosemiotics. This is followed by Cobley (again) with Frederick Stjernfelt who contribute on biosemiotics and learning, then Gerald Ostdiek from philosophy, and Morten Tønnessen focusing upon ethics in particular. Myrdene Anderson writes from anthropology, while Timo Maran and Louise Westling provide a view from literary study. The essay closes with Wendy Wheeler reflecting on the movement of biosemiotics as a challenge, often via the ecological humanities, to the kind of so-called ‘postmodern’ thinking that has dominated humanities critical thought in the universities for the past 40 years. Virtually all the matters gestured to in outline above are discussed in much more satisfying detail in the topics which follow.
Both genetic variation and certain culturally transmitted phenotypes show geographic signatures of human demographic history. As a result of the human cultural predisposition to migrate to new areas, humans have adapted to a large number of different environments. Migration to new environments alters genetic selection pressures, and comparative genetic studies have pinpointed numerous likely targets of this selection. However, humans also exhibit many cultural adaptations to new environments, such as practices related to clothing, shelter, and food. Human culture interacts with genes and the environment in complex ways, and studying genes and culture together can deepen our understanding of human evolution.
Humans are uniquely unique, in terms of the extreme differences between them and other living organisms, and the impact they are having on the biosphere. The evolution of humans can be seen, as has been proposed, as one of the major transitions in evolution, on a par with the origins of multicellular organisms or the eukaryotic cell (Maynard Smith & Szathmáry 1997 Major transitions in evolution ). Major transitions require the evolution of greater complexity and the emergence of new evolutionary levels or processes. Does human evolution meet these conditions? I explore the diversity of evidence on the nature of transitions in human evolution. Four levels of transition are proposed—baseline, novel taxa, novel adaptive zones and major transitions—and the pattern of human evolution considered in the light of these. The primary conclusions are that changes in human evolution occur continuously and cumulatively; that novel taxa and the appearance of new adaptations are not clustered very tightly in particular periods, although there are three broad transitional phases (Pliocene, Plio-Pleistocene and later Quaternary). Each phase is distinctive, with the first based on ranging and energetics, the second on technology and niche expansion, and the third on cognition and cultural processes. I discuss whether this constitutes a ‘major transition’ in the context of the evolutionary processes more broadly; the role of behaviour in evolution; and the opportunity provided by the rich genetic, phenotypic (fossil morphology) and behavioural (archaeological) record to examine in detail major transitions and the microevolutionary patterns underlying macroevolutionary change. It is suggested that the evolution of the hominin lineage is consistent with a mosaic pattern of change.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Major transitions in human evolution’.
Niche construction theory (NCT) has been represented as a new and comprehensive theory of evolution, one that breaks the constraints imposed by the dominant and largely gene-selectionist standard evolutionary model that is presently mischaracterized as “Darwinian.” I will argue that NCT is not so much a new theory, as it is a fruitful readmission of a venerable physiological perspective on adaptation, selection and evolution. This perspective is closer in spirit and philosophy to the original (and richer) Darwinian idea developed by Darwin himself, and that animated much of the rich late nineteenth century debate about evolution, heredity, adaptation and development, a debate that was largely eclipsed by the early twentieth century emergence of the Neodarwinian synthesis. I will argue that a full realization of the promise of NCT turns on a full understanding of another intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century, Claude Bernard’s conception of homeostasis, a profound statement of the nature of life that has, through the twentieth century, come to be widely misunderstood and trivialized.
This book has one explicit purpose: to present a new theory of cultural learning in organisations which combines practice-based learning with cultural models - a cognitive anthropological schema theory of taken-for-granted connections - tied to the everyday meaningful use of artefacts. The understanding of culture as emerging in a process of learning open up for new understandings, which is useful for researchers, practitioners and students interested in dynamic studies of culture and cultural studies of organisations. The new approach goes beyond culture as a static, essentialist entity and open for our possibility to learn in organisations across national cultures, across ethnicity and across the apparently insurmountable local educational differences which makes it difficult for people to communicate working together in an increasingly globalized world. The empirical examples are mainly drawn from organisations of education and science which are melting-pots of cultural encounters.
Scientific activities take place within the structured sets of ideas and assumptions that define a field and its practices. The conceptual framework of evolutionary biology emerged with the Modern Synthesis in the early twentieth century and has since expanded into a highly successful research program to explore the processes of diversification and adaptation. Nonetheless, the ability of that framework satisfactorily to accommodate the rapid advances in developmental biology, genomics and ecology has been questioned. We review some of these arguments, focusing on literatures (evo-devo, developmental plasticity, inclusive inheritance and niche construction) whose implications for evolution can be interpreted in two ways-one that preserves the internal structure of contemporary evolutionary theory and one that points towards an alternative conceptual framework. The latter, which we label the 'extended evolutionary synthesis' (EES), retains the fundaments of evolutionary theory, but differs in its emphasis on the role of constructive processes in development and evolution, and reciprocal portrayals of causation. In the EES, developmental processes, operating through developmental bias, inclusive inheritance and niche construction, share responsibility for the direction and rate of evolution, the origin of character variation and organism-environment complementarity. We spell out the structure, core assumptions and novel predictions of the EES, and show how it can be deployed to stimulate and advance research in those fields that study or use evolutionary biology.
© 2015 The Author(s).
Defining the process of learning as an apprenticeship--a social activity that is mediated by parents and peers who support and challenge the child's understanding and skills--Rogoff here explores the mental development of children. She draws from and expands on the work of Vygotsky in her examination of the dynamic relationship between thinking processes and the cultural context and gathers evidence from various areas--cognitive and developmental psychology, cultural psychology, anthropology, infancy studies, and communications research. By integrating available evidence and her own research, Rogoff provides a coherent and broadly based account of cognitive development in the sociocultural context. Written in a provocative and engaging style and supplemented by photographs and original drawings by the author, this book will be used by students as well as researchers in developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, and those in the related disciplines of communication, anthropology, and education.
Synopsis
Evidence from across the tree of life suggests that epigenetic inheritance is more common than previously thought. If epigenetic inheritance is indeed as common as the data suggest, this finding has potentially important implications for evolutionary theory and our understanding of how evolution and adaptation progress. However, we currently lack an understanding of how common various epigenetic inheritance types are, and how they impact phenotypes. In this perspective, we review the open questions that need to be addressed to fully integrate epigenetic inheritance into evolutionary theory and to develop reliable predictive models for phenotypic evolution. We posit that addressing these challenges will require the collaboration of biologists from different disciplines and a focus on the exploration of data and phenomena without preconceived limits on potential mechanisms or outcomes.
Kindred is the definitive guide to the Neanderthals. Since their discovery over 160 years ago, they've metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. While 21st century scientific understanding of Neanderthals is complex and fascinating, much remains inaccessible outside the specialist literature.
In Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes uses her first-hand experience at the cutting-edge of Palaeolithic research to share this knowledge, shoving aside clichés of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals the Neanderthals as curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. They ranged across vast tracts of tundra and steppe, but also stalked in dappled forests and waded in the Mediterranean Sea. Above all, they were successful: survivors of over 300,000 years of massive climate change.
At a time when our species has never faced greater threats, we're obsessed with what makes us special. Only one kind of human walks Earth today, but histories of our dominance and success aren't the whole truth: many of our pioneering forebears are, in genetic terms, even more extinct than Neanderthals. Moreover, much of what's claimed to define us was also in Neanderthals, our closest relatives, whose DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination... perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality.
Contemporary understandings of paleoanthropological data illustrate that the search for a line defining, or a specific point designating, "modern human" is problematic. Here we lend support to the argument for the need to look for patterns in the paleoanthropological record that indicate how multiple evolutionary processes intersected to form the human niche, a concept critical to assessing the development and processes involved in the emergence of a contemporary human phenotype. We suggest that incorporating key elements of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) into our endeavors offers a better and more integrative toolkit for modeling and assessing the evolution of the genus Homo. To illustrate our points, we highlight how aspects of the genetic exchanges, morphology, and material culture of the later Pleistocene complicate the concept of "modern" human behavior and suggest that multiple evolutionary patterns, processes, and pathways intersected to form the human niche.
The theoretical status of 'niche construction' in evolution is intensely debated. Here we substantiate the reasons for different interpretations. We consider two concepts of niche construction brought to bear on evolutionary theory; one that emphasizes how niche construction contributes to selection and another that emphasizes how it contributes to development and inheritance. We explain the rationale for claims that selective and developmental niche construction motivate conceptual change in evolutionary biology and the logic of those who reject these claims. Our analysis shows how the contention arises from alternative assumptions regarding the causal independence of the processes that generate variation, differential fitness and inheritance. 1 Introduction 2 Selective Niche Construction 2.1 Selective niche construction interpreted as a challenge to the received view2.2Selective niche construction interpreted as compatible with the received view 2.3 A fault line in interpretative understanding3Developmental Niche Construction 3.1Developmental niche construction interpreted as a challenge to the received view 3.2 Developmental niche construction interpreted as compatible with the received view 3.3 A fault line in interpretative understanding 4 Understanding the Fault Line 4.1 Causation in evolving systems 5 Anomalies, Communication Failure, and Conceptual Change © 2017 The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved.
Jakob von Uexküll is mostly known for his concept of Umwelt—the meaningful surrounding of animals. von Uexküll insisted vehemently on the fact that Umwelt vindicated Kant’s subjectivist epistemology in the biological domain. However, we argue that a crucial yet widely overlooked development in von Uexküll’s theory of meaning implies a more radical vision strikingly germane to J. J. Gibson’s own direct realist epistemology-ontology and in tension with his own subjectivist concept of Umwelt. Gibson argued that organism and environment are complementary and meaning is not constructed via a subjective act but is directly available in the world as opportunities for action, namely, affordances. We show that von Uexküll’s notion of “functional tone” is similar to Gibson’s concept of affordance in that it includes action in perception. More important, von Uexküll introduces the musical metaphor of harmony to characterize the relationship between animal and environment. Like Gibson’s reciprocity, harmony implies an unmediated isomorphism between the dispositions of the animal and those of the environment that allows for direct perceptual contact with the world and action upon it.
The between-generations transmission of phenotypic variations is based on networks operating at different levels–genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic. Since each level involves a network of interactions, integrating such networks of networks may seem hopelessly complex. We suggest that the problem can be drastically simplified if analysis starts from a description of the heritable trait of interest as an attractor in a developmental landscape constructed by networks of inputs at underlying and overlying levels of organization. On this basis, further studies quantifying the different inputs that contribute to the between-generational re-construction of the trait can be made and enable the development of a systemic, dynamic and predictive model of inheritance.
Humans are animals, mammals, primates, and hominoids, and thus we share extensive similarities with each of these groups, especially our closest cousins, the apes. But we are also hominins, specifically genus Homo, species sapiens. Understanding our evolutionary history is understanding both what we have in common with other primates and what happened over the past 7 to 10 million years since our divergence from the other African ape lineages. Or more specifically, what happened in the two-million-year history of our own genus. There is robust evidence that our lineage underwent significant changes in bodies, behavior, and ecologies across the Pleistocene, resulting in the development of a human niche. This essay outlines the deep similarities, and the critical differences, between humans and the apes and offers an anthropological and evolutionary explanation for why we should care.
Human cultural traits-behaviors, ideas, and technologies that can be learned from other individuals-can exhibit complex patterns of transmission and evolution, and researchers have developed theoretical models, both verbal and mathematical, to facilitate our understanding of these patterns. Many of the first quantitative models of cultural evolution were modified from existing concepts in theoretical population genetics because cultural evolution has many parallels with, as well as clear differences from, genetic evolution. Furthermore, cultural and genetic evolution can interact with one another and influence both transmission and selection. This interaction requires theoretical treatments of gene-culture coevolution and dual inheritance, in addition to purely cultural evolution. In addition, cultural evolutionary theory is a natural component of studies in demography, human ecology, and many other disciplines. Here, we review the core concepts in cultural evolutionary theory as they pertain to the extension of biology through culture, focusing on cultural evolutionary applications in population genetics, ecology, and demography. For each of these disciplines, we review the theoretical literature and highlight relevant empirical studies. We also discuss the societal implications of the study of cultural evolution and of the interactions of humans with one another and with their environment.
Making offers a series of profound reflections on what it means to create things, on materials and form, the meaning of design, landscape perception, animate life, personal knowledge and the work of the hand. It draws on examples and experiments ranging from prehistoric stone tool-making to the building of medieval cathedrals, from round mounds to monuments, from flying kites to winding string, from drawing to writing. The book will appeal to students and practitioners alike, with interests in social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art and design, visual studies and material culture.
This comment offers a brief rejoinder to Phillipe Descola’s ‘Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding’, and concludes an exchange that began with my article ‘A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology: Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture’. I review the definitions of such key terms as naturalism, interiority and production, and the issues that divide us with regard to the possibility of unmediated knowledge, the salience of structural models, and the future of comparative anthropology.
See also:
A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology: Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture 10.1080/00664677.2015.1136591
Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding (Response to Ingold’s A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology) 10.1080/00664677.2016.1212523
The following is a response to Tim Ingold’s review article entitled ‘A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology’ and the second part of a larger dialogue concerning: Beyond Nature and Culture, by Philippe Descola. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013, xxii + 463 pp., foreword by Marshall Sahlins, preface, notes, bibliography, index, (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-226-14445-0.
See also:
A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology: Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture 10.1080/00664677.2015.1136591
Rejoinder to Descola’s Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding10.1080/00664677.2016.1212532
Philippe Descola is a self-confessed naturalist. Yet in his book Beyond Nature and Culture, he presents naturalism as just one of four possible ontologies that – for different peoples in different periods – have underwritten human thought and practice. The others are animism, totemism and analogism. In this article I explore some of the paradoxical consequences of his positing naturalism both as a frame for comparative analysis and as one of the terms enframed by it. These have to do with the logic of the ontological four-fold, the conversion of inference into schemas of tacit knowledge, the division between psychological and linguistic constructions of the self, alternative senses of interiority and physicality, the dichotomies between humanity as condition and as species, and between mind and nature, and the proper use of the concepts of production and transmission. I conclude by imagining what would happen if animism, rather than naturalism, were taken as a starting point for comparative understanding. Then life, growth and movement, rather than figuring as the exterior emanations of a world of being, would be restored to immanence in a world of becoming.
Please see the response and rejoinder to this article:
Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding (Response to Ingold's A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology) 10.1080/00664677.2016.1212523
Rejoinder to Descola's Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding 10.1080/00664677.2016.1212532
Men have the capacity to respond to the transition to fatherhood and nurturant investments in their partners and children with shifts in neuroendocrine function (such as decreased testosterone production). This capacity may be adaptive, reflecting fitness benefits accrued by some hominin males who responded to partnering and parenting with neuroendocrine shifts promoting cooperation and investment. These patterns are not uniform inter- or intraculturally, suggesting that cultural dimensions and norms that shape men’s developmental experiences as well as their social and economic roles in adulthood are potentially paramount in the expression of diverse biological responses to fatherhood. Here, I draw extensively on animal models and human studies demonstrating the effects of early-life parenting experiences on the function of neuroendocrine systems in adulthood. Based on my team’s research in Cebu, Philippines, and other anthropological studies, I propose a new model (dedication, attitude, duration, and salience [DADS]) that provides a framework for interpreting diverse human paternal biological profiles by integrating across multiple explanatory scales. Specifically, I use this model as an exemplar to highlight the utility of integrating evolutionary and phylogenetic perspectives with those focusing on the developmental niche, early-life influences on neuroendocrine system function (developmental plasticity and programming), and the broad influence of cultural processes and political economy. © 2016 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
Both evolutionary/scientific and constructivist or humanistic approaches have brought valuable understandings to anthropology and continue to do so today. Discussions of the split(s) and possibilities of reintegration across anthropology have been valuable; however, practical reintegration will only come from a serious and open intellectual engagement with a diverse range of theoretical contexts and a direct connection to data. This volume is an attempt to provide innovative contexts for, and examples of, anthropologists reporting on their data and/or conceptualizing approaches to the data in ways that cross or straddle boundaries. While we offer niche construction theory and the extended evolutionary synthesis as common framework, the articles are not all in agreement on explanatory means and priorities. And this is a good thing. To develop an effective reintegration requires anthropologists to move away from artificial dichotomies and standing grudges and toward collaborations and a respect for theoretical plurality. The unifying endeavor of this collection is in the sincere attempt by all of its members to draw on more than a single approach and to integrate understandings gleaned from the inside and the outside. © 2016 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
Seeing bodies and evolutionary histories as quantifiable features that can be measured separately from the human cultural experience is an erroneous approach. Seeing cultural perceptions and the human experience as disentangled from biological form and function and evolutionary history is equally misguided. An integrative anthropology moves past dichotomous perspectives and seeks to entangle the “inside” and “outside,” methodologically and theoretically, to move beyond isolationist trends in understanding the human. In this paper I illustrate the underlying rationale for some anthropological lack of engagement with neo-Darwinian approaches and review contemporary evolutionary theory discussing how, in combination with a dynamic approach to human culture, it can facilitate integration in anthropology. Finally, I offer an overview of the human niche concept and propose a heuristic framework as a set of shared assumptions about human systems to help frame a sincerely anthropological and emphatically evolutionary approach to the human experience. © 2016 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
In this article, I ask how anthropology can adopt a decolonial approach that incorporates and acknowledges the critical scholarship of Indigenous thinkers whose work and labour informs many current trends in Euro-Western scholarship, activism and socio-political discourse. I also query how to address ongoing structural colonialism within the academy in order to ensure that marginalised voices are heard within academic discourses.
I have not had time to prepare a formal paper and wish to apologise for this, since I had every intention of doing so and it has only been made impossible by a combination of extremely heavy duties and being ill for several months this year. On the other hand, I understand that a number of you have either read the little essay I wrote recently [Chance and Necessity, Knopf, New York (1971)], or at least heard of it. Therefore, I hope that if those who have read it agree or disagree, you can ask me some questions after this presentation. What I would like to do here, is the following. I have taken a few notes at random, which are, of course, on various subjects that I did discuss in the book, and I would like to emphasise a few points.
Cultural traits originate through creative or innovative processes, which might be crucial to understanding how culture evolves and accumulates. However, because of its complexity and apparent subjectivity, creativity has remained largely unexplored as the dynamic underpinning of cultural evolution. Here, we explore the approach to innovation commonly taken in theoretical studies of cultural evolution and discuss its limitations. Drawing insights from cognitive science, psychology, archeology, and even animal behavior, it is possible to generate a formal description of creativity and to incorporate a dynamic theory of creativity into models of cultural evolution. We discuss the implications of such models for our understanding of the archaeological record and the history of hominid culture.
