Related Research Articles
In biology, evolution is the change in heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Genetic variation tends to exist within any given population as a result of genetic mutation and recombination. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation.
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of communication existing among animals. Many argue that the origins of language probably relate closely to the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the facts and implications of this connection.
Pascal Robert Boyer is an American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist of French origin, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. Boyer is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Eurasiatic is a proposed language macrofamily that would include many language families historically spoken in northern, western, and southern Eurasia.
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.
The Anatolian hypothesis, also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory, first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. It is the main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis, or steppe theory, which enjoys more academic favor.
Animal culture can be defined as the ability of non-human animals to learn and transmit behaviors through processes of social or cultural learning. Culture is increasingly seen as a process, involving the social transmittance of behavior among peers and between generations. It can involve the transmission of novel behaviors or regional variations that are independent of genetic or ecological factors.
Traditional transmission is one of the 13 design features of language developed by anthropologist Charles F. Hockett to distinguish the features of human language from that of animal communication. Critically, animal communication might display some of the thirteen features but never all of them. It is typically considered as one of the crucial characteristics distinguishing human from animal communication and provides significant support for the argument that language is learned socially within a community and not inborn where the acquisition of information is via the avenue of genetic inheritance.
Harvey Whitehouse is chair of social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford.
The evolutionary origin of religion and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology, the origin of language and mythology, and cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion. Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion, evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic, and similarities in great ape behavior.
Quantitative comparative linguistics is the use of quantitative analysis as applied to comparative linguistics. Examples include the statistical fields of lexicostatistics and glottochronology, and the borrowing of phylogenetics from biology.
Cultural group selection is an explanatory model within cultural evolution of how cultural traits evolve according to the competitive advantage they bestow upon a group. This multidisciplinary approach to the question of human culture engages research from the fields of anthropology, behavioural economics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, sociology, and psychology.
Mark David Pagel FRS is an evolutionary biologist and professor. He heads the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading. He is known for comparative studies in evolutionary biology. In 1994, with his spouse, anthropologist Ruth Mace, Pagel pioneered the Comparative Method in Anthropology.
Evolutionary psychology of language is the study of the evolutionary history of language as a psychological faculty within the discipline of evolutionary psychology. It makes the assumption that language is the result of a Darwinian adaptation.
The neuronal recycling hypothesis was proposed by Stanislas Dehaene in the field of cognitive neuroscience in an attempt to explain the underlying neural processes which allow humans to acquire recently invented cognitive capacities. This hypothesis was formulated in response to the 'reading paradox', which states that these cognitive processes are cultural inventions too modern to be the products of evolution. The paradox lies within the fact that cross-cultural evidence suggests specific brain areas are associated with these functions. The concept of neuronal recycling resolves this paradox by suggesting that novel functions actually utilize and 'recycle' existing brain circuitry. Once these cognitive functions find a cortical area devoted to a similar purpose, they can invade the existing circuit. Through plasticity, the cortex can adapt in order to accommodate for these novel functions.
Cognitive ecology of religion is an integrative approach to studying how religious beliefs covary with social and natural dynamics of the environment. This is done by incorporating a cognitive ecological perspective to cross-cultural god concepts. Religious beliefs are thought to be a byproduct of domain-specific cognitive modules that give rise to religious cognition. The cognitive biases leading to religious belief are constraints on perceptions of the environment, which is part and parcel of a cognitive ecological approach. This means that they not only shape religious beliefs, but they are determinants of how successfully cultural beliefs are transmitted.
Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture. Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect.".
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.
The theory of divergent modes of religiosity (DMR) is intended to explain how religions are created, transmitted, and changed. DMR theory was first developed by anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse following his ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. The theory proposes that religions tend to coalesce around two divergent modes, termed imagistic and doctrinal, which are distinguished primarily by their ritual practices. The imagistic mode is characterized by infrequently performed, high arousal rituals (e.g. initiation rites) and is associated with small scale, exclusive religious groups. In contrast the doctrinal mode is characterized by frequently performed, low arousal rituals (e.g. daily recitations of sacred texts) and is associated with larger inclusive communities, as found in the major world religions.
The Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) project is a historical-comparative linguistics research project hosted by the Santa Fe Institute. It aims to provide a detailed genealogical classification of the world's languages.
References
- ↑ Harms, William (April 1998). "Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, Dan Sperber. Blackwell Publishers, 1996, vii + 175 pages". Economics and Philosophy. 14 (1): 177–184. doi:10.1017/s026626710000506x. ISSN 0266-2671. S2CID 154659909.
- ↑ Miton, Helena; Claidière, Nicolas; Mercier, Hugo (July 2015). "Universal cognitive mechanisms explain the cultural success of bloodletting". Evolution and Human Behavior. 36 (4): 303–312. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.01.003.
- ↑ Pagel, Mark; Atkinson, Quentin D.; Meade, Andrew (October 2007). "Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history". Nature. 449 (7163): 717–720. Bibcode:2007Natur.449..717P. doi:10.1038/nature06176. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 17928860. S2CID 4428703.
- ↑ Pagel, Mark; Atkinson, Quentin D.; S. Calude, Andreea; Meade, Andrew (2013-05-06). "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110 (21): 8471–8476. Bibcode:2013PNAS..110.8471P. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1218726110 . ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3666749 . PMID 23650390.
- ↑ Buskell, Andrew (2017-06-01). "What are cultural attractors?". Biology & Philosophy. 32 (3): 377–394. doi:10.1007/s10539-017-9570-6. ISSN 1572-8404. PMC 5491627 . PMID 28713188.