Cultural evolutionists have long been interested in the problem of why fertility declines as populations develop. By outlining plausible mechanistic links between individual decision-making, information flow in populations and competition between groups, models of cultural evolution offer a novel and powerful approach for integrating multiple levels of explanation of fertility transitions. Howe...

Whilst it is widely accepted that the process of national transition from a »developing« to a »developed« status is assessed against economic indicators, it is also recognized that the process of transition is driven by a variety of demographic, social, political, cultural, and biological changes that both lead to and follow from economic transition. Anthropologists have traditionally sought to...

The Neolithic transition is the shift from hunting–gathering into farming. About 9000 years ago, the Neolithic transition began to spread from the Near East into Europe, until it reached Northern Europe about 5500 years ago. There are two main models of this spread. The demic model assumes that it was mainly due to the reproduction and dispersal of farmers. The cultural model assumes that Europ...

In Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Zizek discusses the fascinating image of the Romanian flag with its national emblem cut out as a most "salient index of the 'open' character of a historical situation in its becoming," which is characteristic of "that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has already lost the hegemonical power, has not yet been replaced by the new...

The rich cultural heritage is gradually loosing its value, respect and identity. The present generation is focusing on outside changes with drastic influences and not realizing the damage caused on the withering of their cultural traditions. This paper seeks to discuss the importance of literature as a vehicle for the preservation of cultural heritage in relation to some of many major issues ta...

We present extensive numerical simulations of the Axelrod's model for social influence, aimed at understanding the formation of cultural domains. This is a nonequilibrium model with short range interactions and a remarkably rich dynamical behavior. We study the phase diagram of the model and uncover a nonequilibrium phase transition separating an ordered (culturally polarized) phase from a diso...

There is a long-standing controversy between two models of the Neolithic transition. The demic model assumes that the Neolithic range expansion was mainly due to the spread of populations, and the cultural model considers that it was essentially due to the spread of ideas. Here we integrate the demic and cultural models in a unified framework. We show that cultural diffusion explains ∼40% of th...