Year: 2022

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE spends this and next weekend looking at the biology of culture, a challenging but important subject. Only recently have scientists started to tackle seriously this topic, previously thought unscientific and probably bogus. But careful thinking combined with animal survey across taxa of behavior suggest it is not only real, but widespread in nature. Even microbes have social culture and communication. View in LinkedIn

CULTURE as “shared meaning systems passed on across generations.” https://lnkd.in/dfnBFVP View in LinkedIn

RECENT STUDIES. “In the past few decades, scholars from several disciplines have pursued the curious parallel noted by Darwin between the genetic evolution of species and the cultural evolution of beliefs, skills, knowledge, languages, institutions, and other forms of socially transmitted information.” https://lnkd.in/dEH-wAF View in LinkedIn

THE DIFFERENCE. “All primates engage in one or another form of social learning. Humans engage in cultural learning.” (See later in this topic), https://lnkd.in/dV4Wk5g View in LinkedIn

REASON FOR SUCCESS. “Humans have colonised and transformed every terrestrial environment on the planet. This ecological success can be attributed to our capacity for cultural evolution.” (But more so have microbes, including bacteria and viruses), https://lnkd.in/dWk69PN View in LinkedIn

THE PROCESS. “High fidelity social learning allows the preservation/accumulation of cultural traits.” https://lnkd.in/dWk69PN View in LinkedIn

TWO EVOLUTIONS. “Human cultural change constitutes a Darwinian evolutionary process that shares key characteristics with (but is not identical in details to) genetic evolution.” https://lnkd.in/dWk69PN View in LinkedIn

CULTURAL EVOLUTION. “This second evolutionary process has been instrumental in our species’ dramatic ecological success by allowing the rapid, open-ended generation and accumulation of technology, social institutions, knowledge systems and behavioural practices far beyond the complexity of other species’ socially learned behaviour.” https://lnkd.in/dWk69PN View in LinkedIn

RAPID CHANGE. “A Foot in the River, subtitled Why Our Lives Change—and the Limits of Evolution. Fernandez-Armesto's explicit focus is the rapidity with which human culture changes. He contrasts contemporary human culture with cultures found in other primate species and with cultures found in other eras of human history, and he finds that contemporary human culture changes so rapidly that it stands out.” https://lnkd.in/d9XKzDt View in LinkedIn