Subscribe:
RSS feed
Promoting discussion and collaboration in social and cultural evolution
Browsing All posts tagged under »dual inheritance«
Cultural Group Selection in Phase Transition
June 2, 2012 by Peter Turchin
I am writing this in Frankfurt, where we have just concluded a week-long meeting on cultural evolution. I was hoping to write about it earlier, but this meeting has been so intense that I literally could not find a couple of hours to put my impressions on paper (or computer screen). The meeting was organized […]
More on Cultural Genotypes
April 26, 2012 by Peter Turchin
Thanks to all who left comments on my previous post. This discussion has been very useful and led me to adjust my views. Here’s how I would formulate the issues now: (1) ‘Phenotype’ is determined jointly by (i) genetically stored information, (ii) culturally stored information, and (iii) the environment. It doesn’t make sense to speak […]
What’s Cultural Genotype?
April 24, 2012 by Peter Turchin
A week ago I was at a workshop Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution (check out the Focus Article by Elinor Ostrom that set the stage for the meeting). One major topic of discussion was what might be the cultural analog of genotype. In biology phenotype is the observable traits and characteristics of an organism, […]
Peter J. Richerson. Human Cooperation is a Complex Problem with Many Possible Solutions: Perhaps All of Them Are True!
December 2, 2012 by SEF Editor
5
Recent debates on the SEF and in Steven Pinker’s Edge essay The false allure of group selection, and commentaries thereupon, seem to underplay one of the most important points about human societies, the interaction of, and often synergy between two major structural principles for organizing cooperation in human societies. I think that everyone agrees that […]