Year: 2022

HUGE ISSUE. “Culture shapes the evolution of cognition culture, radically alters the relationship between natural selection and cognition.” https://lnkd.in/dCmU6-w View in LinkedIn

NATIVISM. “Culture facilitates rapid biological adaptation yet rules out nativism: Behavioral universals arise that are underpinned by weak biases rather than strong innate constraints.” https://lnkd.in/dCmU6-w View in LinkedIn

MAKING THE MIND. “We therefore expect culture to have dramatically shaped the evolution of the human mind, giving us innate predispositions that only weakly constrain our behavior.” https://lnkd.in/dCmU6-w View in LinkedIn

IMPACT ON LANGUAGE. “How should we expect biology and culture to interact to shape language and the language faculty? One possibility is that the rate of language change far exceeds that of biological evolution, preventing genetic assimilation of linguistic features into the language faculty.” https://lnkd.in/dCmU6-w View in LinkedIn

WEAK BIASES ACCUMULATE. “A well-known property of cultural evolution is that, under a wide range of circumstances, weak inductive biases acting on learning can have strong effects in the cultural system as the effects of those biases accumulate.” http://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4530.full View in LinkedIn

WEAK BIASES CAN FIX. “Given enough time, a weak bias in favor of a particular trait can eventually drive that trait to fixation. Probabilistic constraints combined with culture therefore potentially provide an alternative to nativism or nothing: Behavioral universals can be underpinned by weak biases at the level of the individual.” https://lnkd.in/dCmU6-w View in LinkedIn

“CULTURE IS BIOLOGICAL.” An immensely famous quote. https://lnkd.in/dfnBFVP View in LinkedIn

GENETICS OF CULTURE. “I review current progress in the pursuit of an evolutionary science of culture that is grounded in both biological and evolutionary theory, but also treats culture as more than a proximate mechanism that is directly controlled by genes. Both genetic and cultural evolution can be described as systems of inherited variation that change over time in response to processes such as selection, migration, and drift.” https://lnkd.in/dEH-wAF View in LinkedIn

GENES VERSUS CULTURE. “Differences between genetic and cultural change are taken seriously, such as the possibility in the latter of nonrandomly guided variation or transformation, blending inheritance, and one-to-many transmission.” https://lnkd.in/dEH-wAF View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends dealing with the evolution of culture. The common perception that culture evolves faster than biological evolution is confirmed, and the interactions between the two are at an early stage of being analyzed. Even though the field was plagued by early bias that it was not a scientific subject, this subject is clearly of enormous importance as we approach the inevitable melding of man and machine. View in LinkedIn