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Darwinian evolution for culture
Following on from my piece about songs and scientists, underverse (Chris Schoen) has taken me to task:
… it becomes easy to see one of the flaws in memetic thinking. Changes in “culture” differ from changes in biology in that they are not random; they are directed toward a specific challenge or concern.
THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE- A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher
We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.
Deric Bownds' MindBlog: Prosociality in large human groups more likely due to culture than to genetics.
Bell et al. think about whether human prosocial behaviors such as food sharing, taxation, and warfare - nearly completely absent in other vertebrates - are more plausibly explained as arising from to cultural or genetic selection during competition among large groups.
Word Of The Moment: Mindcasting
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Twitter is a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of his colleagues and fellow netizens.
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I favor streaming as the core verb for all these activities, anyway. Casting is too strongly related to broadcast, which is strange, considering Jay is the guy who coined the term "the people formerly known as the audience" to get away from the info producer/consumer dialectic.
On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting | Technology | Los Angeles Times
Twitter, the micro-messaging service where users broadcast short thoughts to one another, has been widely labeled the newest form of digital narcissism. And if it’s not self-obsession tweeters are accused of, it’s self-promotion, solipsism or flat out frivolousness.
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There’s already a vibrant community of Twitter users who are using the system to share and filter the hyper-glut of online information with ingenious efficiency. Forget what you had for breakfast or how much you hate Mondays. That’s just lifecasting.
Mindcasting is where it’s at. -
Twitter is a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of his colleagues and fellow netizens.
The World Without Technology
The problem with this line of questioning is that technology predated our humanness. Many other animals used tools millions of years before humans. Chimpanzees made (and of course still make) hunting tools from thin sticks to extract termites from mounds, or slam rocks to break nuts. Even termites themselves construct vast towering shells of mud for their homes. Ants herd aphids and farm fungi in gardens. Birds weave elaborate twiggy fabrics for their nests. The strategy of bending the environment to use as if it were part of your body is a billion year old trick at least.
Can Culture Be Encoded in DNA? New Research Says "Yes"
The "Nature versus Nurture" debate just got more complicated. (Well, even more complicated than the original "If you really think you can reduce all of biology to such a simplistic division you're missing pretty much every point involved" complication.) Birds have been observed reconstructing cultural information in complete isolation, meaning that culture can be genetically encoded.
Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection, Study Shows
The process of natural selection can act on human culture as well as on genes, a new study finds. Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes. Speeded or slowed rates of evolution typically indicate the action of natural selection in analyses of the human genome.
Culture May Be Encoded in DNA
“We found that in this case, the culture was pretty much encoded in the genome,” said Partha Mitra of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, co-author of a study in Nature on Sunday. (Wired Science)
Cultural Evolution in Full Text
I’ve managed to round up a bunch of pdf or full text links for recent papers on cultural evolution and on the evolution of language. (Neuroanthropology)
FASTER EVOLUTION MEANS MORE ETHNIC DIFFERENCES
The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we're going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism.
Getting Hooked on Sin
Daniel Lende is a neuroanthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. He and Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, discuss what this new field can teach us about craving, capoeira and the link between the brain and culture. (Scientific American)
Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark
Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark
30 parts
October 3 - 6, 2008
These videos will continue to be posted as they upload to Google Video. We appreciate your patience with this process.
BEYOND BELIEF DVDs are now available! Purchase them here. Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark DVDs will be available soon.
Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark is the third in an annual series of conversations: an ongoing project to foster and promote the use of reason in formulating social policy. This year, we asked participants to propose a Candle -- a potential solution to a problem that they have identified in their area of expertise or informed passion.
What is Our Fundamental Nature?
"Humans create and depend on emergent organizations beyond the individual- structures ranging from dyads and families to institutions and cultures. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with genetic, neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. These higher organizations have long been apparent, but we are beginning to understand their neural, hormonal, and genetic substrates and consequences." | Psychology Today Blogs
How We Evolve
A growing number of scientists argue that human culture itself has become the foremost agent of biological change. (Seed)
Cyborg Manifesto (Donna Haraway)
"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Originally "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
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