Cultural Change and Human Behavior: Evolution or Development?

Cultural Change and Human Behavior: Evolution or Development?*

! e study of cultures in today’s world has become a major academic exercise. ! ere are many challenges and problems for human beings that are created by the relationship between cultural inheritance and individuals, namely, through modernization and globalization processes. ! e immediate outcomes of these challenges and problems are ethnic con" icts, cultural clash and other cultural competitio...

Cultural change and human development.

Crosscultural studies of cognitive development preceded studies of cultural leaming. The former studies made an implicit assumption that culture is external whereas development is internal. Bruner’s cultural psychology (1990) and Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner’s cultural learning (1993) assume, by contrast, that culture is inside the individual, that human beings are intrinsically social and pri...

Economic Development and Cultural Change

The past inflexibility of international banks in granting concessions (like elimination of surcharges, partial debt cancellations, lower interest rates, etc.) is linked by Ortiz to case-by-case strategy adopted in debt renegotiations. Within this context, the fear of setting precedents is seen as a major explanation in the banks' negotiating stance. To renew political commitment to the improvem...

The Evolution of Cultural Evolution The evolutionary origins of human cultural capacities and their implications for understanding human behavior

Niche construction, biological evolution, and cultural change.

We propose a conceptual model that maps the causal pathways relating biological evolution to cultural change. It builds on conventional evolutionary theory by placing emphasis on the capacity of organisms to modify sources of natural selection in their environment (niche construction) and by broadening the evolutionary dynamic to incorporate ontogenetic and cultural processes. In this model, ph...