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HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION | Edge.org - 0 views

www.edge.org/...-culture-drove-human-evolution

shared by Charlotte Pierce on 02 Feb 13 - No Cached

this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information,
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important selection pressures over the course of human evolution are the things that culture creates
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fire and cooking is that they're culturally transmitted
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whole bunch of downstream effects
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status you get from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area
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possess resources
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From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige, and these have quite different ethologies.
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Dominance [ethology] is about physical posture, of size
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attracted to prestigious
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long period of interaction between genes and culture.
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culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments.
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created a selection pressure for lots of cultural learning.
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environment starts to fluctuate
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for cultural learning to really take off, you need more than one model
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trying out different techniques
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humans are strangely good at long distance running.
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only humans have it.
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culturally transmitted
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affected our anatomy
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evolution of societal complexity
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after the origins of agriculture, there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony, leading to the benefits of exchange, of the ability to maintain markets, of division of labor and of higher levels of cooperation. Then you get intense competition amongst the early farming groups, and this is going to favor those groups who have the abilities to expand.
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religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies
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galvanize cooperation in larger groups and sustained cooperation amongst non relatives
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mergence of high-moralizing gods
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concerned about exactly the kinds of things that are going to be a problem for running a large-scale society, like how you treat other members of your religious group or your ethnic group
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kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor
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remind believers of their god, believers cheat less,
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attending a ritual, you elevate the degree of belief in the high-moralizing gods or the priests
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credibility-enhancing displays
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animal sacrifice
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circumcision
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large sum of money
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akes the observers more likely to acquire the belief
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conformist transmission
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self-perpetuating cycle
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tap our cultural transmission abilities to deepen the faith
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risk in developing specialization
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culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning
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we don't see amongst other animals is cumulative cultural evolution.
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importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology
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case study in Tasmania
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cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia
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technological downturn
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number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information
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rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies, because these allow ideas to flow very rapidly from place to place.
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incentive to hide your information
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monogamy
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reduces male-male competition
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discount the future less and engage in productive activities
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trade freedom off against other social ills
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widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males
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promote high levels of polygyny
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stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution
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distinguish genetic evolution and cultural evolution
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epigenetic evolution
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Cognition and our ability to think are all interwoven
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genetic programs is to be able to acquire ideas, beliefs and values and weave them into our brain such that they then affect our biolog
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Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness
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make a large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger
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if you're going to be fair to a stranger, then you're taking money away from your famil
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adherence to a world religion matters
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relationship between market integrations using measures like distance from market and people's willingness to build impartial institutions
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rule of law.
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when you have risk managing institutions these impartial norms can spread.
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Charlotte Pierce on 02 Feb 13

[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis-this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis-this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information. </div>

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The Future of Cooperation: A Talk by Tim O'Reilly - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by Charlotte Pierce on 01 Feb 13 - No Cached

Charlotte Pierce on 01 Feb 13

Some of the biggest changes sweeping the technology world today are new forms of network and computer-enabled cooperation. It was easy enough to see this pattern in open source software development or Wikipedia, a bit more challenging to see how it powered Web 2.0 giants like Google and Amazon, but it gets really interesting when you are able to see how new kinds of man-machine symbiosis and networked cooperation are at the heart of projects like the Google self-driving car, the reinvention of retail by Apple and Square, transportation services from RelayRides to Uber, and even in new models for networked government.

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Some of the biggest changes sweeping the technology world today are new forms of network and computer-enabled cooperation. It was easy enough to see this pattern in open source software development or Wikipedia, a bit more challenging to see how it powered Web 2.0 giants like Google and Amazon, but it gets really interesting when you are able to see how new kinds of man-machine symbiosis and networked cooperation are at the heart of projects like the Google self-driving car, the reinvention of retail by Apple and Square, transportation services from RelayRides to Uber, and even in new models for networked government. </div>

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Managing the Virtual Commons: Kollock and Smith - 0 views

www.connectedaction.net/...naging-the-virtual-commons.htm

shared by Charlotte Pierce on 15 Feb 13 - No Cached

Charlotte Pierce on 15 Feb 13

Computer-mediated communication systems are believed to have powerful effects on social relationships. Many claim that this new form of social interaction encourages wider participation, greater candor, and an emphasis on merit over status. In short, the belief is that social hierarchies are dissolved and that flatter, more egalitarian social organizations emerge. Networked communications, it is argued, will usher in a renewed era of democratic participation and revitalized community. But as with earlier technologies that promised freedom and power, the central problems of social relationships remain, although in new and possibly more challenging forms.

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Computer-mediated communication systems are believed to have powerful effects on social relationships. Many claim that this new form of social interaction encourages wider participation, greater candor, and an emphasis on merit over status. In short, the belief is that social hierarchies are dissolved and that flatter, more egalitarian social organizations emerge. Networked communications, it is argued, will usher in a renewed era of democratic participation and revitalized community. But as with earlier technologies that promised freedom and power, the central problems of social relationships remain, although in new and possibly more challenging forms. </div>

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