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  1. Cultural Evolutionary Psychology as Generalization by Recursion.Karim Baraghith & Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla - forthcoming - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie:1-20.
    Cultural evolutionary psychology (CEP) accounts for the cultural evolution of cognition. It is based on evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory and aims at a synthetic attempt which is achieved by what we want to call ‘generalization by recursion’. We argue in this paper that the evolutionary psychology program as a whole could greatly benefit from CEP’s generalization. As we will show, there is one theoretical element in particular, that CEP relevantly generalizes in contrast to its predecessors. It comes from (...)
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  • Cultural Evolution and the Evolution of Cultural Information.Alejandro Gordillo-García - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (1):30-42.
    Cultural evolution is normally framed in informational terms. However, it is not clear whether this is an adequate way to model cultural evolutionary phenomena and what, precisely, “information” is supposed to mean in this context. Would cultural evolutionary theory benefit from a well-developed theory of cultural information? The prevailing sentiment is that, in contradistinction to biology, informational language should be used nontechnically in this context for descriptive, but not explanatory, purposes. Against this view, this article makes the case for the (...)
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  • Damasio, Antonio, 2018. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. New York: Pantheon. 336 pages. [REVIEW]Shimon Edelman - 2018 - Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 2 (2):119-124.
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  • When can cultural selection explain adaptation?Azita Chellappoo - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (1):1-23.
    Cultural selection models aim to explain cultural phenomena as the products of a selective process, often characterising institutions, practices, norms or behaviours as adaptations. I argue that a lack of attention has been paid to the explanatory power of cultural selection frameworks. Arguments for cultural selection frequently depend on demonstrating only that selection models can in principle be applied to culture, rather than explicitly demonstrating the explanatory payoffs that could arise from their application. Understanding when and how cultural selection generates (...)
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  • Likeness-Making and the Evolution of Cognition.Hajo Greif - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (1):1-24.
    Paleontological evidence suggests that human artefacts with intentional markings might have originated already in the Lower Paleolithic, up to 500.000 years ago and well before the advent of ‘behavioural modernity’. These markings apparently did not serve instrumental, tool-like functions, nor do they appear to be forms of figurative art. Instead, they display abstract geometric patterns that potentially testify to an emerging ability of symbol use. In a variation on Ian Hacking’s speculative account of the possible role of “likeness-making” in the (...)
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  • Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation.Marcus Arvan - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 89-109.
    The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission (...)
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  • Memes, genes, and signs: Semiotics in the conceptual interface of evolutionary biology and memetics.Ivan Fomin - 2019 - Semiotica 2019 (230):327-340.
    In 1976, Richard Dawkins coined the term meme as a way to metaphorically project bio-evolutionary principles upon the processes of cultural and social development. The works of Dawkins and of some other enthusiasts had contributed to a rise in popularity of the concept of memetics (“study of memes”), but the interest to this new field started to decline quite soon. The conceptual apparatus of memetics was based on a number of quasi-biological terms, but the emerging discipline failed to go beyond (...)
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  • Cultural evolution in Vietnam’s early 20th century: a Bayesian networks analysis of Hanoi Franco-Chinese house designs.Quan-Hoang Vuong, Quang-Khiem Bui, Viet-Phuong La, Thu-Trang Vuong, Manh-Toan Ho, Hong-Kong T. Nguyen, Hong-Ngoc Nguyen, Kien-Cuong P. Nghiem & Manh-Tung Ho - 2019 - Social Sciences and Humanities Open 1 (1):100001.
    The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (...)
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  • Positive Frequency Dependence in Graffiti: An Empirical Case Study of Cultural Evolution.Julia A. Maddison & Michael Doebeli - 2013 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 13 (3-4):287-311.
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  • Five Clarifications about Cultural Evolution.Liane Gabora - 2011 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (1-2):61-83.
    This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich et al.. First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons that respond to microfeatures. This enables associations to be made, and cultural change to be generated. Second, ‘replicator dynamics’ do not ensure natural selection. The replicator notion does not capture the distinction between actively interpreted self-assembly code and passively copied self-description, which leads to a fundamental principle of natural selection: inherited information is (...)
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  • History & Mathematics: Trends and Cycles.Leonid Grinin & Andrey Korotayev - 2014 - Volgograd: "Uchitel" Publishing House.
    The present yearbook (which is the fourth in the series) is subtitled Trends & Cycles. It is devoted to cyclical and trend dynamics in society and nature; special attention is paid to economic and demographic aspects, in particular to the mathematical modeling of the Malthusian and post-Malthusian traps' dynamics. An increasingly important role is played by new directions in historical research that study long-term dynamic processes and quantitative changes. This kind of history can hardly develop without the application of mathematical (...)
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  • Mathematical Modeling of Biological and Social Evolutionary Macrotrends.Leonid Grinin, Alexander V. Markov & Andrey V. Korotayev - 2014 - In Leonid Grinin & Andrey Korotayev (eds.), History & Mathematics: Trends and Cycles. Volgograd: "Uchitel" Publishing House. pp. 9-48.
    In the first part of this article we survey general similarities and differences between biological and social macroevolution. In the second (and main) part, we consider a concrete mathematical model capable of describing important features of both biological and social macroevolution. In mathematical models of historical macrodynamics, a hyperbolic pattern of world population growth arises from non-linear, second-order positive feedback between demographic growth and technological development. Based on diverse paleontological data and an analogy with macrosociological models, we suggest that the (...)
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  • a variational approach to niche construction.Axel Constant, Maxwell Ramstead, Samuel Veissière, John Campbell & Karl Friston - 2018 - Journals of the Royal Society Interface 15:1-14.
    In evolutionary biology, niche construction is sometimes described as a genuine evolutionary process whereby organisms, through their activities and regulatory mechanisms, modify their environment such as to steer their own evolutionary trajectory, and that of other species. There is ongoing debate, however, on the extent to which niche construction ought to be considered a bona fide evolutionary force, on a par with natural selection. Recent formulations of the variational free-energy principle as applied to the life sciences describe the properties of (...)
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  • On Similarities between Biological and Social Evolutionary Mechanisms: Mathematical Modeling.Leonid Grinin - 2013 - Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History 4:185-228.
    In the first part of this article we survey general similarities and differences between biological and social macroevolution. In the second (and main) part, we consider a concrete mathematical model capable of describing important features of both biological and social macroevolution. In mathematical models of historical macrodynamics, a hyperbolic pattern of world population growth arises from non-linear, second-order positive feedback between demographic growth and technological development. This is more or less identical with the working of the collective learning mechanism. Based (...)
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  • Curiously the same: swapping tools between linguistics and evolutionary biology.Lindell Bromham - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):855-886.
    One of the major benefits of interdisciplinary research is the chance to swap tools between fields, to save having to reinvent the wheel. The fields of language evolution and evolutionary biology have been swapping tools for centuries to the enrichment of both. Here I will discuss three categories of tool swapping: conceptual tools, where analogies are drawn between hypotheses, patterns or processes, so that one field can take advantage of the path cut through the intellectual jungle by the other; theoretical (...)
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  • Self-Interest and the Design of Rules.Manvir Singh, Richard Wrangham & Luke Glowacki - 2017 - Human Nature 28 (4):457-480.
    Rules regulating social behavior raise challenging questions about cultural evolution in part because they frequently confer group-level benefits. Current multilevel selection theories contend that between-group processes interact with within-group processes to produce norms and institutions, but within-group processes have remained underspecified, leading to a recent emphasis on cultural group selection as the primary driver of cultural design. Here we present the self-interested enforcement (SIE) hypothesis, which proposes that the design of rules importantly reflects the relative enforcement capacities of competing parties. (...)
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  • When will a Darwinian approach be useful for the study of society?Samuel Bagg - 2017 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 16 (3):259-281.
    In recent years, some have claimed that a Darwinian perspective will revolutionize the study of human society and culture. This project is viewed with disdain and suspicion, on the other hand, by many practicing social scientists. This article seeks to clear the air in this heated debate by dissociating two claims that are too often assumed to be inseparable. The first is the ‘ontological’ claim that Darwinian principles apply, at some level of abstraction, to human society and culture. The second (...)
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  • Modularity and Recombination in Technological Evolution.Mathieu Charbonneau - 2016 - Philosophy and Technology 29 (4):373-392.
    Cultural evolutionists typically emphasize the informational aspect of social transmission, that of the learning, stabilizing, and transformation of mental representations along cultural lineages. Social transmission also depends on the production of public displays such as utterances, behaviors, and artifacts, as these displays are what social learners learn from. However, the generative processes involved in the production of public displays are usually abstracted away in both theoretical assessments and formal models. The aim of this paper is to complement the informational view (...)
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  • Definitional Argument in Evolutionary Psychology and Cultural Anthropology.John P. Jackson - 2010 - Science in Context 23 (1):121-150.
    ArgumentEvolutionary psychologists argue that because humans are biological creatures, cultural explanationsmustinclude biology. They thus offer to unify the natural and social sciences. Evolutionary psychologists rely on a specific history of cultural anthropology, particularly the work of Alfred Kroeber to make this point. A close examination of the history of cultural anthropology reveals that Kroeber acknowledged that humans were biological and culture had a biological foundation; however, he argued that we should treat culture as autonomous because that would bring benefits to (...)
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  • The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation.Carl F. Craver - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann (eds.), Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 27-52.
    According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...)
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  • Mapping complex social transmission: technical constraints on the evolution of cultures.Mathieu Charbonneau - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (4):527-546.
    Social transmission is at the core of cultural evolutionary theory. It occurs when a demonstrator uses mental representations to produce some public displays which in turn allow a learner to acquire similar mental representations. Although cultural evolutionists do not dispute this view of social transmission, they typically abstract away from the multistep nature of the process when they speak of cultural variants at large, thereby referring both to variation and evolutionary change in mental representations as well as in their corresponding (...)
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  • The Organism-Centered Approach to Cultural Evolution.Andreas De Block & Grant Ramsey - 2016 - Topoi 35 (1):283-290.
    In this paper, we distinguish two different approaches to cultural evolution. One approach is meme-centered, the other organism-centered. We argue that in situations in which the meme- and organism-centered approaches are competing alternatives, the organism-centered approach is in many ways superior. Furthermore, the organism-centered approach can go a long way toward understanding the evolution of institutions. Although the organism-centered approach is preferable for a broad class of situations, we do leave room for super-organismic or sub-organismic explanations of some cultural phenomena.
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  • Distinguishing the reflective, algorithmic, and autonomous minds: Is it time for a tri-process theory.Keith E. Stanovich - 2009 - In Jonathan St B. T. Evans & Keith Frankish (eds.), In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond. Oxford University Press. pp. 55--88.
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  • Cultural Niche Construction: An Introduction.Kevin N. Laland & Michael J. O’Brien - 2011 - Biological Theory 6 (3):191-202.
    Niche construction is the process whereby organisms, through their activities and choices, modify their own and each other’s niches. By transforming natural-selection pressures, niche construction generates feedback in evolution at various different levels. Niche-constructing species play important ecological roles by creating habitats and resources used by other species and thereby affecting the flow of energy and matter through ecosystems—a process often referred to as “ecosystem engineering.” An important emphasis of niche construction theory (NCT) is that acquired characters play an evolutionary (...)
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  • Darwinism Extended: A Survey of How the Idea of Cultural Evolution Evolved.Chris Buskes - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (3):661-691.
    In the past 150 years there have been many attempts to draw parallels between cultural and biological evolution. Most of these attempts were flawed due to lack of knowledge and false ideas about evolution. In recent decades these shortcomings have been cleared away, thus triggering a renewed interest in the subject. This paper offers a critical survey of the main issues and arguments in that discussion. The paper starts with an explication of the Darwinian algorithm of evolution. It is argued (...)
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  • Origins of the Qualitative Aspects of Consciousness: Evolutionary Answers to Chalmers' Hard Problem.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2012 - In Liz Stillwaggon Swan (ed.), Origins of mind. New York: Springer. pp. 259--269.
    According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ceteris Paribus Laws.Alexander Reutlinger, Gerhard Schurz, Andreas Hüttemann & Siegfried Jaag - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Laws of nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many important key concepts such as causation, explanation, confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally, philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which were taken to be at least true, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) (...)
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  • 'People of celebrity' as a new social stratum and elite.Leonid Grinin - 2009 - In Leonid Grinin & Andrey Korotayev (eds.), Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations: Cultural Dimensions. Moscow: KRASAND.
    However, strange though it may seem, personal celebrity (as well as fame, popularity etc.) is hardly included in the list of those resources. This happens despite the increasing role of this phenome-non in modern life and the fact that the aspiration for it affects value aims of a growing number of people. What is more, it begins to influence the changes of social relations and stratification. The subject of the present article is the investigation of the influence of the personal (...)
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  • Darwinian 'blind' hypothesis formation revisited.Maria E. Kronfeldner - 2010 - Synthese 175 (2):193--218.
    Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided (...)
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  • Cultural neuroscience of consciousness: From visual perception to self-awareness.Joan Chiao & T. Harada - 2008 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (10-11):58-69.
    Philosophical inquiries into the nature of consciousness have long been intrinsically tied to questions regarding the nature of the self. Although philosophers of mind seldom make reference to the role of cultural context in shaping consciousness, since antiquity culture has played a notable role in philosophical conceptions of the self. Western philosophers, from Plato to Locke, have emphasized an individualistic view of the self that is autonomous and consistent across situations, while Eastern philosophers, such as Lao Tzu and Confucius, have (...)
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  • Mental time travel across the disciplines: The future looks bright.Thomas Suddendorf & Michael C. Corballis - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (3):335-345.
    There is a growing interest in mental time travel in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and evolutionary psychology. Here we review current issues in each of these disciplines. To help move the debates forward we name and distinguish 15 key hypotheses about mental time travel. We argue that foresight has for too long lived in the shadows of research on memory and call for further research efforts.
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  • Extended evolutionary theory makes human culture more amenable to evolutionary analysis.Alex Mesoudi - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (4):374-374.
    Jablonka & Lamb's (J&L's) extended evolutionary theory is more amenable to being applied to human cultural change than standard neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. However, the authors are too quick to dismiss past evolutionary approaches to human culture. They also overlook a potential parallel between evolved genetic mechanisms that enhance evolvability and learned cognitive mechanisms that enhance learnability.
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  • Modeling Discontinuous Cultural Evolution: The Impact of Cross-Domain Transfer.Kirthana Ganesh & Liane Gabora - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    This paper uses autocatalytic networks to model discontinuous cultural transitions involving cross-domain transfer, using as an illustrative example, artworks inspired by the oldest-known uncontested example of figurative art: the carving of the Hohlenstein-Stadel Löwenmensch, or lion-human. Autocatalytic networks provide a general modeling setting in which nodes are not just passive transmitters of activation; they actively galvanize, or “catalyze” the synthesis of novel nodes from existing ones This makes them uniquely suited to model how new structure grows out of earlier structure, (...)
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  • Eco-evo-devo and iterated learning: towards an integrated approach in the light of niche construction.José Segovia-Martín & Sergio Balari - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (4):1-23.
    In this paper we argue that ecological evolutionary developmental biology accounts of cognitive modernity are compatible with cultural evolution theories of language built upon iterated learning models. Cultural evolution models show that the emergence of near universal properties of language do not require the preexistence of strong specific constraints. Instead, the development of general abilities, unrelated to informational specificity, like the copying of complex signals and sharing of communicative intentions is required for cultural evolution to yield specific properties, such as (...)
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  • Typology and Natural Kinds in Evo-Devo.Ingo Brigandt - 2021 - In Nuño De La Rosa Laura & Müller Gerd (eds.), Evolutionary Developmental Biology: A Reference Guide. Springer. pp. 483-493.
    The traditional practice of establishing morphological types and investigating morphological organization has found new support from evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), especially with respect to the notion of body plans. Despite recurring claims that typology is at odds with evolutionary thinking, evo-devo offers mechanistic explanations of the evolutionary origin, transformation, and evolvability of morphological organization. In parallel, philosophers have developed non-essentialist conceptions of natural kinds that permit kinds to exhibit variation and undergo change. This not only facilitates a construal of species (...)
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  • The rich detail of cultural symbol systems.Dwight W. Read - 2014 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (4):434-435.
    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. © 2014 Cambridge University Press.
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  • Ecological Inheritance and Cultural Inheritance: What Are They and How Do They Differ?John Odling-Smee & Kevin N. Laland - 2011 - Biological Theory 6 (3):220-230.
    Niche construction theory (NCT) is distinctive for being explicit in recognizing environmental modification by organisms—niche construction—and its legacy—ecological inheritance—to be evolutionary processes in their own right. Humans are widely regarded as champion niche constructors, largely as a direct result of our capacity for the cultural transmission of knowledge and its expression in human behavior, engineering, and technology. This raises the question of how human ecological inheritance relates to human cultural inheritance. If NCT is to provide a conceptual framework for the (...)
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  • Beyond Generalized Darwinism. I. Evolutionary Economics from the Perspective of Naturalistic Philosophy of Biology.Werner Callebaut - 2011 - Biological Theory 6 (4):338-350.
    This is the first of two articles in which I reflect on “generalized Darwinism” as currently discussed in evolutionary economics. I approach evolutionary economics by the roundabouts of evolutionary epistemology and the philosophy of biology, and contrast evolutionary economists’ cautious generalizations of Darwinism with “imperialistic” proposals to unify the behavioral sciences. I then discuss the continued resistance to biological ideas in the social sciences, focusing on the issues of naturalism and teleology. In the companion article (Callebaut, Biol Theory 6. doi: (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ceteris paribus Laws.Alexander Reutlinger, Gerhard Schurz & Andreas Hüttemann - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • The learning and transmission of hierarchical cultural recipes.Alex Mesoudi & Michael J. O’Brien - 2008 - Biological Theory 3 (1):63-72.
    Archaeologists have proposed that behavioral knowledge of a tool can be conceptualized as a “recipe”—a unit of cultural transmission that combines the preparation of raw materials, construction, and use of the tool, and contingency plans for repair and maintenance. This parallels theories in cognitive psychology that behavioral knowledge is hierarchically structured—sequences of actions are divided into higher level, partially independent subunits. Here we use an agent-based simulation model to explore the costs and benefits of hierarchical learning relative to holistic learning, (...)
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  • Language Acquisition Meets Language Evolution.Nick Chater & Morten H. Christiansen - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (7):1131-1157.
    Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the (...)
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  • A formal investigation of Cultural Selection Theory: acoustic adaptation in bird song.G. K. D. Crozier - 2010 - Biology and Philosophy 25 (5):781-801.
    The greatest challenge for Cultural Selection Theory lies is the paucity of evidence for structural mechanisms in cultural systems that are sufficient for adaptation by natural selection. In part, clarification is required with respect to the interaction between cultural systems and their purported selective environments. Edmonds et al. have argued that Cultural Selection Theory requires simple, conclusive, unambiguous case studies in order to meet this challenge. To that end, this paper examines the songs of the Rufous-collared Sparrow, which seem to (...)
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  • Morality as Cognitive Scaffolding in the Nucleus of the Mesoamerican Cosmovision.Alfredo Robles Zamora - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library.
    The aim of this chapter is to investigate changes and continuities of human moral systems from an evolutionary and socio-historical perspective. Specifically, I will argue that these systems can be approached through the lens of non-genetic inheritance systems and niche construction. I will examine morality from a comparative socio-historical perspective. From this, I suggest that these inheritance systems are cognitively scaffolded, and that these scaffolds are part of the nucleus of the historical Mesoamerican cosmovision.
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  • The Role of Culture and Evolution for Human Cognition.Andrea Bender - 2020 - Topics in Cognitive Science 12 (4):1403-1420.
    Since the emergence of our species at least, natural selection based on genetic variation has been replaced by culture as the major driving force in human evolution. It has made us what we are today, by ratcheting up cultural innovations, promoting new cognitive skills, rewiring brain networks, and even shifting gene distributions. Adopting an evolutionary perspective can therefore be highly informative for cognitive science in several ways: It encourages us to ask grand questions about the origins and ramifications of our (...)
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  • Towards Scalable Governance: Sensemaking and Cooperation in the Age of Social Media.Iyad Rahwan - 2017 - Philosophy and Technology 30 (2):161-178.
    Cybernetics, or self-governance of animal and machine, requires the ability to sense the world and to act on it in an appropriate manner. Likewise, self-governance of a human society requires groups of people to collectively sense and act on their environment. I argue that the evolution of political systems is characterized by a series of innovations that attempt to solve two ‘scalability’ problems: scaling up a group’s ability to make sense of an increasingly complex world, and to cooperate in increasingly (...)
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  • Has mental time travel really affected human culture?Alex Mesoudi - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (3):326-327.
    Suddendorf & Corballis (S&C) claim that mental time travel has significantly affected human cultural change. This echoes a common criticism of theories of Darwinian cultural evolution: that, whereas evolution is blind, culture is directed by people who can foresee and plan for future events. Here I argue that such a claim is premature, and more rigorous tests of S&C's claim are needed.
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  • Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution.Peter Richerson - 2008 - Human Nature 19 (2):119-137.
    Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations; (4) the “cultural fitness” of a mental representation can be inferred from its successful (...)
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  • Evolution in Nature and Culture.Gerhard Schurz - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (1):95-110.
    The goal of this paper is to defend the theory of generalized evolution (GE) against criticisms by laying down its theoretical principles and their applications in a unified way. Section 2 develops GE theory and its realization in biological evolution (BE) and cultural evolution (CE). The core of GE theory consists of the three Darwinian principles together with the models of population dynamics (PD). Section 3 reconstructs the most important differences between BE and CE. While BE is predominantly based on (...)
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  • A process-based approach to cognitive behavioral therapy: A theory-based case illustration.Clarissa W. Ong, Steven C. Hayes & Stefan G. Hofmann - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    Despite the significant contribution of cognitive-behavioral therapy to effective treatment options for specific syndromes, treatment progress has been stagnating, with response rates plateauing over the past several years. This stagnation has led clinical researchers to call for an approach that instead focuses on processes of change and the individual in their particular context. Process-based therapy is a general approach representing a model of models, grounded in evolution science, with an emphasis on idiographic methods, network models of case conceptualization, and enhancing (...)
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  • (1 other version)Social Animals and the Potential for Morality: On the Cultural Exaptation of Behavioral Capacities Required for Normativity.Estelle Palao - 2021 - In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library. Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 111-134.
    To help bridge the explanatory gap of how normativity branched off into morality in the course of evolutionary history, I claim that morality is a form of social normativity, specifically a form of cultural normativity. Furthermore, with the origins of its behavioral capacities rooted in normative practice, morality should be considered as an exaptation, a secondary adaptation shaped through cultural selection and evolution. Cultural selection pressures differ across social groups, as well as various species. Empirical evidence has shown that animals (...)
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