Reconstructing the rise and fall of social complexity in human societies through time is fundamental for understanding some of the most important transformations in human history. Phylogenetic methods based on language diversity provide a means to reconstruct pre-historic events and model the transition rates of cultural change through time. We model and compare the evolution of social complexi...

Cross-cultural comparison is a critical method by which we can examine the interaction between culture and psychological processes. However, comparative methods tend to overlook cultural dynamics - the formation, maintenance, and transformation of cultures over time. The present article gives a brief overview of four different types of research designs that have been used to examine cultural dy...

Even though there is no agreed definition of what constitutes an ethnic group, there are a number of features that most academic treatments of the subject attribute to such groups: a proper collective name, shared myths of origin, and cultural characteristics, such as language, religion, traditions and customs that distinguish a given group from others. Different combinations of these features ...

In this paper, I argue that the adaptive fit between human cultures and their environment is persuasive evidence that some form of evolutionary mechanism has been important in driving human cultural change. I distinguish three mechanisms of cultural evolution: niche construction leading to cultural group selection; the vertical flow of cultural information from parents to their children, and th...

Culture pervades human life and is at the origin of the success of our species. A wide range of other animals have culture too, but often in a limited form that does not complexify through the gradual accumulation of innovations. We developed a new paradigm to study cultural evolution in primates in order to better evaluate our closest relatives' cultural capacities. Previous studies using tran...

With introduction of social niche effects into a model of cultural change, the frequency of a practice cannot predict the frequency of its underlying belief. The combination of a general model with empirical data from a specific case illustrates the importance of collaboration between modellers and field researchers, and identifies the type of quantitative data necessary for analysing case stud...

Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two d...

Water management is facing major challenges due to increasing uncertainties caused by climate and global change and by fast changing socio-economic boundary conditions. More attention has to be devoted to understanding and managing the transition from current management regimes to more adaptive regimes that take into account environmental, technological, economic, institutional and cultural cha...