Cultural Evolution - Science topic

I would take exception that "civilization" is "advancement". All arguments that human biological and behavioral changes are "progress" are tautological, qualitatively assumptions, and indefensible. Natural selection has helped shape our behaviors not through "improvement, but simple change through time. Evolution is not directional, it is organically messy.

In the African context, ethnicity significantly influences fashion. Ethnic groups in Africa have distinct traditional patterns, textiles, and clothing styles that reflect their cultural heritage. These traditional elements are incorporated into fashion, preserving ethnic identities and celebrating their uniqueness. Additionally, fashion in Africa carries cultural significance, with garments and accessories adorned with symbolic meanings. Ethnicity plays a crucial role in showcasing individual and group identities, as Africans proudly display their heritage through traditional attire. However, African fashion also embraces global trends, blending traditional and contemporary designs to create fusion fashion. Ultimately, ethnicity in Africa influences fashion by providing a connection to cultural roots, fostering a sense of identity, and serving as a platform for creative expression.

It is very difficult to respond to this question. The author may be serious but the grammar and spelling are confusing. Does the author mean to attribute the cause of schizophrenia to 'evaluation', or to human evolution? If the latter, then this does in fact sound like the grandiose and delusional patterns that frequently observed in the writings of people experiencing psychosis. Natural variation in genes and their expression may account for the development of dysfunctional brains, but I can't see how it could have an evolutionary advantage. People living with schizophrenia often don't have partners or adequate incomes, so where is the evolutionary advantage? It is a very frightening and life-changing condition with genetic origins.

Traditional performing arts within cultural evolution was a big topic historically for the German schools of "comparative musicology" (including dance studies). You can find many of their books and articles in English, mostly from the 1890s-1950s. In recent years, there is a bit of a revival of the topic.

Dear Syafiq,

I am certainly not an expert on George Herbert Mead's works. However, from the vantage point of 21st century science, I'd say the following: While there will certainly be aspects in his writings pertinent to cultural evolution, he, of course, just didn't have the extensive empirical data base we have today - particularly in respect to the insights of cultural primatology, evolutionary biology, sociobiology/evolutionary psychology and the different branches of anthropology, among others. Perhaps Mead actually did go some way towards our modern understanding of "culture" as socially transmitted, group-specific behavioral traits. Nevertheless, he was simply lacking most of the data, models and theories we have today. So I would urge some caution in perhaps too hastily establishing links here (if this is what you are intending to do?).

Another, unrelated point: Wasn't one of his main (posthumously published) works mainly the result of his students' editorial work in compiling his long-time Chicago lecture on social psychology into a single book? I think I read somewhere that because of this editorial context, one should also always consult his own, original writings. Just my two cents worth...

Best,

Julius

The true Culture never falls Dear Dr. Aijaz Panhwar , it never goes extinct, it "transits" and I consider that no Nation owns any Culture, Nations can fall but true Cultures never fall, they are transmitted by "Historical Memory".

Thank you for your appreciation Dear Dr. Nandan Bhattacharya

I suggest you the following books:

Clark, Peter (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013

MacEvedy, Colin. The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History. New York: Penguin Books, 1979.

MacEvedy, Colin. Cities of the Classical World An Atlas and Gazetteer of 120 Centres of Ancient Civilization. New York: Penguin Books, 2011.

Maisels, Charles Keith Maisels. Early Civilizations of the Old World. The formative histories of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China. London-New York: Routledge, 2005.

Woolf, Greg. The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Yoffee, Norman. Myths of the Archaic State Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

D.E. Morant Sometimes artists' intentions are significant, sometimes not. But as you suggest, de-narrativized abstraction has it own narratives; however, they are not the Rorschach-type narratives you suggest but rather the theoretical narratives described by Tom Wolf in The Painted Word.

It is a simple fact that everything we feed is growing. And a second simple fact is that we only become to know what we are able to believe in. So it is very important to deal with imaginative literature to feed our Imagination!

The process of becomming able to to things is: Conception (Imagination) followed by perception, followed by action(radius).

Group subjectivity or belief systems indeed can change from society to society. But even in the same group if what is measured is not based on data, it is subjective. Objectivity of means that it doesn't matter who the individual is or the culture group, the fact stays the same.

What you are measuring whether subjective or objective, you must do it in an objective matter. You can measure opinions which are very subjective, but you can count them. So in research you have to consider all data and deal with them in a objective manner.

Definitively, it's a pity Bourdieu isn't here anymore!

Dear Dr. Abbas

Florigen is a systemic signal that promotes flowering. Its molecular nature is a conserved FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) protein that belongs to the PEBP family. Recent work identified FT orthologues as originators of florigen and their polypeptides as the likely systemic agent.

Derek, here is the key couple of paragraphs from the Biological Theory paper I mentioned.

"We do not think that anything in cognitive science shows that we can simply “read-off” hominin cognition from behaviour or from artefacts. Even if skilled behaviour is not driven by explicit representation in semantic memory, we still need a positive account of implicit representation and its interaction with explicit information (which often plays an important role in teaching and error diagnosis). One of the puzzling features of human evolution is the lack of any clear correlation between the appearance of new hominin species and marked changes in the technical, ecological, and social lives of hominins (with the possible exception of the correlation between the evolution of erectus and Acheulian technology). This lack of correlation has been much discussed with respect to our species. The supposed problem is that Anatomically Modern Humans appeared in the historical record hundreds of thousands of years before Behaviourally Modern Humans. Indeed, on a recent estimate our species has existed for about 300k years (Hublin, Ben-Ncer et al. 2017), while most discussions place the emergence of Behaviourally Modern Humans within the last 100k years (Henshilwood and Marean 2003). If this is so then for more than half of our biological existence, the technical competence, ecological role and social lives of members of our species seemed akin to their Middle Stone Age contemporaries and ancestors rather than to their conspecific descendant. From about 50 kya, after a long and patchy transition period, our forager ancestors’ social, economic, and technical lives fell into the range of variation of historically known foragers. Yet those ancient humans are of the very same species as us. So why did it take so long for the Modern Mind to join the Modern Body? This is Renfrew’s “sapient paradox”  (see e.g. Renfrew 2008) however if either  niche construction approaches or 4E views of cognition are on the right track there is no reason to expect innovations in material technology, foraging, or social life to be correlated with speciation patterns. Reasons for this include (i) the cognitive capacities of individuals do not depend solely on their individual phenotypes, let alone on their neocortex, for they depend on their access to external supports as well; and (ii) the informational resources of communities are not a simple reflection of the cognitive capacities of individuals in those communities (and it is often communities, through collective action, that leave material traces). How the community is networked, and the patterns of informational cooperation (and lack of cooperation) are equally important.

As a consequence, there is no paradox in the “sapient paradox”. This makes the methodological problems more acute for cognitive archaeology. Those who emphasise the cognitive importance of niche construction also think that cumulative cultural evolution impacts on how we think, not just what we think; the defenders of extended and distributed approaches to cognition converge on the conclusion that there can be very significant cognitive differences within species. This potential variation in human actions and hence capacities stems from multiple factors: cognitive capacities depend not just on  genetic endowment, but also on the material and social supports that scaffold their cognition. There is no reason at all to suppose that (for instance) norms of teaching and information sharing, or the availability of material supports for cognition, are roughly constant across genetically similar communities that are nonetheless widely separated in space and time. If all of that is right, we cannot, for instance, aggregate data on material culture and economic lives across Neanderthal sites to form a composite picture of “the Neanderthal Mind” (Wynn and Coolidge 2004, Wynn, Overmann et al. 2016). Even idealising away from genetic evolution in the Neanderthal lineage, there is no “the Neanderthal Mind”.  At best, there is a spectrum of variation, a space of possible Neanderthal Minds. There is a certain reluctance amongst the archaeological sympathisers of 4E cognition to embrace this consequence. Thus John Gowlett, Clive Gamble and Robin Dunbar sign up to many of its signature ideas, while wanting to hang onto the idea that relative neocortex volume constrains social complexity (indexed as maximum group size) (Gamble, Dunbar et al. 2014). The seriousness of this challenge depends on how profoundly these extra-somatic factors influence cognition, and on when those factors began both to be important in hominin evolution and vary from community to community. Great ape intelligence may be embodied, but it is presumably neither extended nor embedded."

Hello:

I work with the human species in general, specifically homo sapiens. Although in the second volume of my work I put the bosquimans as the living example of the longest evolution of our evolution and, therefore, as a model for others. Thak you for you interest

Hi John. I'm afraid you have the dates wrong for the work on the structure of DNA. The discovery of the structure of the DNA double helix was made in 1953. By then, there was already strong evidence that DNA was the chemical basis of heredity, since the work of Avery, McLeod and McCarty was published in 1944. The Hershey-Chase experiment was published in 1952.

Dear Orlando,

Thank you for your suggestions! This is exactly the kind of book I am looking for. In this case, I have read it already and I referred to it in my working notes. I also agree about your differentiation of specific domains like the beautiful or aesthetic, the cognitive, and the moral. In this regard, I find Habermas's formal pragmatics very useful.

Please let me know, if you have something else.

All the best,

Michael

Dear Colleague,

The literature is vast. If you wish to focus on criticism, articles by Don Ringe (with various coauthors) may be useful. On a different note, the book "Historical Linguistics and Lexicostatistics"  ed. by V.V. Shevoroshkin and Paul Sidwell (Melbourne, 1999) could provide you with food for thought (especially the chapters by Sergei Starostin, Harald Sverdrup).

I attach a paper which contains relevant details of the maths applied in the revised version of glottochronology (my co-author, V. Blazek is the mathematician :-)).

Hope, this helps.

Best regards,

Irén H.

hi

our paper on CDA might offer some thoughts:

You may find some useful references in the works of  Norma McArthur, formerly at the Australian National University. There was a period in European colonial history  (eg New Caledonia) when the colonised population was so disrupted, divided, demoralised and decimated by the colonists' diseases that birth rates fell to perilously low levels. Could this be the meaning? However, this is clearly not the Lapita people... about whom try Jack Golson, Daniel Frimigacci, Matthew Spriggs....

"Big History" as an exhibition or educational concept indeed works well on a high school level.  In the U.S., the Mount Rushmore National Memorial has served as a source of multiple educational concepts in many U.S. high schools. That memorial, situated in Keystone, South Dakota, consists of four busts, 18 meters high each, of four major U.S. presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. These busts were artistically blasted by T.N.T. out of a mountainside by Gutzon Borglum and 400 workers.  These particular presidents could symbolize the birth, growth, development, and conservation of the U.S.  Hence the monument could teach historical events on a grand scale. Moreover, numerous animals and plants lodge in and on the monument, and could provide study of the ecosystem.  

Thank you, Michael, very interesting reply; dear Jose Manuel, surely you know Terence McKenna's proposals regarding the genesis of the human mind based on consumption of psychostimulants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna). One of my colleagues, the neurophysiologist Rafael Castro (jrafacastro@gmail.com) would certainly be very interested in speaking with you about possible collaboration.

On the evolution of human behavior, and adding some physiological and neurobiological references, perhaps you might be interested in a crazy proposal that I posted in May on "Advances in Anthropology" (Love is the cause of human evolution), because in it I make a brief comment about the human proclivity to pharmacological and non-pharmacological addictions that might fit well with your work on the psychedelic pharmacophagy, good luck.

Thanks for the answer Nikolaus.  Unfortunately, I think too many people dismiss vertical cultural information transfer because of the prevalence of horizontal information transfer.  Do parents and children not normally exchange ideas in an indistinguishable after the fact way to which they exchange genes?

What precludes any signature of Mendelian inheritance from a cultural locus / meme?

the neural correlates for cognitive dissonance is dorsolateral PFC and ACC to my knowledge. as the frontal cortex in humans came later in evolution, the CD would have not been peresent in species not having PFC or less developed PFC.

somatic marker hpothesis(damasio1991) and risk as feelings(lowenstein) suggests that the relationship between the cognition and emotional system is not efficient like the connections between emotion to cognition. CD suggets that discomfort(emotion) is the results of cognition. this process will be very slow and weak. i dont know what is the effect of anticipated and anticipatory emotions on CD. but it seems that the CD evoking emotion is overestimated.

even in terms of attitude, cognition does not always lead to affect for example i have cognition: pulution is bad but if we see polution due to a factory, the bad feeling associated with it will vary people to vary, even many will not have emotions for the event that is expected by the cognition.