Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T22:52:44.557Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Cultural variant interaction in teaching and transmission

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2015

Marshall Abrams*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294-1260mabrams@uab.eduhttp://members.logical.net/~marshall

Abstract

Focus on the way in which cultural variants affect other variants' probabilities of transmission in modeling and empirical work can enrich Kline's conceptualization of teaching. For example, the problem of communicating complex cumulative culture is an adaptive problem; teaching methods that manage transmission so that acquisition of some cultural variants increases the probability of acquiring others, provide a partial solution.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrams, M. (2013) A moderate role for cognitive models in agent-based modeling of cultural change. Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling 1(16):133. Available at: http://www.casmodeling.com/content/1/1/16.Google Scholar
Abrams, M. (forthcoming) Coherence, Muller's ratchet, and the maintenance of culture. Philosophy of Science.Google Scholar
Atran, S. & Medin, D. L. (2008) The native mind and the cultural construction of nature. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (1985) Culture and the evolutionary process. University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (1987) The evolution of ethnic markers. Cultural Anthropology 2(1):6579.Google Scholar
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (2005) The origin and evolution of cultures. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J. & Henrich, J. (2011) The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation. [Colloquium Paper]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 108(Suppl. 2):10918–25. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1100290108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bransford, J. & National Research Council (U.S.) (2000) How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. National Academy Press.Google Scholar
Castro, L. & Toro, M. A. (2014) Cumulative cultural evolution: The role of teaching. Journal of Theoretical Biology 347(C):7483. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2014.01.006.Google Scholar
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. & Feldman, M. W. (1981) Cultural transmission and evolution: A quantitative approach. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Dehghani, M., Sachdeva, S., Ekhtiari, H., Gentner, D. & Forbus, K. (2009) The role of cultural narratives in moral decision making. In: Proceedings of the 31th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. ed., Taatgen, N.A. and van Rijn, H., pp. 1912–17. Cognitive Science Society. Available at: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/Proceedings/2009/papers/397/index.html.Google Scholar
Descola, P. (1994) In the society of nature: A native ecology in Amazonia, trans. Scott, N.. Editions de la Maison des Sciences de L'Homme and Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Enquist, M., Strimling, P., Eriksson, K., Laland, K. & Sjostrand, J. (2010) One cultural parent makes no culture. Animal Behaviour 79:1353–62.Google Scholar
Fogarty, L., Strimling, P. & Laland, K. N. (2011) The evolution of teaching. Evolution 65(10):2760–70. doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01370.x.Google Scholar
Gentner, D., Holyoak, K. J. & Kokinov, B. N., eds. (2001) The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Henrich, J. & Broesch, J. (2011) On the nature of cultural transmission networks: Evidence from Fijian villages for adaptive learning biases. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 336:1139–48.Google Scholar
Henrich, J. & McElreath, R. (2003) The evolution of cultural evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews 12(3):123–35. doi:10.1002/(ISSN)1520-6505.Google Scholar
Hofstadter, D. R. & Sander, E. (2013) Surfaces and essences: Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking. Basic Books.Google Scholar
Holyoak, K. J. & Thagard, P. (1995) Mental leaps: Analogy in creative thought. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kashima, Y. (2000) Maintaining cultural stereotypes in the serial reproduction of narratives. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26(5):594604.Google Scholar
McElreath, R., Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (2003) Shared norms and the evolution of ethnic markers. Current Anthropology 44(1):122–29.Google Scholar
Mesoudi, A. & O'Brien, M. J. (2008) The learning and transmission of hierarchical cultural recipes. Biological Theory 3(1):6372.Google Scholar
Mesoudi, A. & Whiten, A. (2004) The hierarchical transformation of event knowledge in human cultural transmission. Journal of Cognition and Culture 4(1):124.Google Scholar
Richerson, P. J., Boyd, R., Borgerhoff-Mulder, M. & Durham, W. H. (1997) Are cultural phylogenies possible? In: Human nature, between biology and the social sciences, ed. Weingart, P., Richerson, P. J., Mitchell, S. D. & Maasen, S., pp. 355–86. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Smelser, N. J. (1993) Culture: Coherent or incoherent. In: Theory of culture, ed. Munch, R. & Smelser, N. J., Ch. 1, pp. 328. University of California Press. Available at: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8q2nb667.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1996) Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995) Relevance: Communication and cognition, 2nd edition. Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sterelny, K. (2012) The evolved apprentice. How evolution made humans unique. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tehrani, J. J. & Collard, M. (2009) On the relationship between interindividual cultural transmission and population-level cultural diversity: A case study of weaving in Iranian tribal populations. Evolution and Human Behavior 30(4):286300.Google Scholar
Thagard, P. (2012) Mapping minds across cultures. In: Grounding social sciences in cognitive sciences, ed. Sun, R., Ch. 2, pp. 3562. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Thibodeau, P. H. & Boroditsky, L. (2013) Natural language metaphors covertly influence reasoning. PLoS ONE 8(1):e52961. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0052961.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, W. C. (2014) Entrenchment and scaffolding: An architecture for a theory of cultural change. In: Developing scaffolds in evolution, culture, and cognition, ed. Caporael, L. R., Griesemer, J. R. & Wimsatt, W. C., pp. 77105. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, W. C. & Griesemer, J. R. (2007) Reproducing entrenchments to scaffold culture: The central role of development in cultural evolution. In: Integrating evolution and development, ed. Sansom, R. & Brandon, R. N., Ch. 7, pp. 227323. MIT Press.Google Scholar