Human language has unusual structural properties that enable open-ended communication. In recent years, researchers have begun to appeal to cultural evolution to explain the emergence of these structural properties. A particularly fruitful approach to this kind of explanation has been the use of laboratory experiments. These typically involve participants learning and interacting using artifici...

Although genetic information is acquired only once, cultural information can be both abandoned and reacquired during an individual's lifetime. Therefore, cultural evolution will be determined not only by cultural traits' ability to spread but also by how good they are at sticking with an individual; however, the evolutionary consequences of this aspect of culture have not previously been explor...

Histories of evolutionary thought are dominated by organic evolution. The colossus in our midst that is evolutionary biology casts its shadow over history, making it appear that what is so widespread and important today was always the primary subject of evolutionary speculation. Thus many histories assume that the core meaning of evolution is the change of organic life and that other forms of e...

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The use of biological models and metaphors in studies of culture has a long and checkered history. While there are many superficial similarities between biological and cultural evolution, attempts to pin down such analogies have not been wholly successful. One limiting factor may be a lack of empirical evidence that the basic assumptions of the evolutionary model are met within a cultural syste...

The present study is a cross-cultural comparison of typical dreams of “being chased” between Tibetan and Han Chinese dreamers. The research is based on 208 interviews combined with responses to a Dream Questionnaire. In total 569 subjects were involved in the research project: 278 Tibetan and 291 Han undergraduate college students. Results show an overall occurrence of a being-chased dream in 9...

Camporesi integrates into his account insights from social and cultural anthropology (not least, Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas), and maintains a wholesome balance between a concern with the symbolic meaning of the cultural systems of the flesh, food, etc., and, on the other hand, a more materialist account banausically concerned with what people ate, what made them sick, and what they died of. ...

Optimization problems arise in many real-world applications. Cultural Algorithms are a class of computational models derived from observing the cultural evolution process in nature, compared with genetic algorithm the cultural algorithms have high convergence speed. Aiming at the disadvantages of basic cultural algorithms like being trapped easily into a local optimum, this paper improves the b...

Sorghum ergot in India is caused by Claviceps africana and C. sorghi. The distributions of these two species in India is not known. Eighty-nine sorghum ergot isolates were cultured from young sphacelia obtained from male sterile sorghum plants artificially inoculated using inoculum collected in the field. Based on cultural characteristics, the isolates were separated into two groups which diffe...

Our previous work on real-valued function optimization problems had shown that cultural learning emerged as the result of meta-level interaction or swarming of knowledge sources, “knowledge swarms” in the belief space. These meta-level swarms induced the swarming of individuals in the population space, “Cultural Swarms”. The interaction of these knowledge sources produced emergent phases of pro...