Studying Cultural Evolution at the Tips: Human Cross-cultural Ecology

Studying Cumulative Cultural Evolution in the Laboratory

Cumulative cultural evolution is the term given to a particular kind of social learning, which allows for the accumulation of modifications over time, involving a ratchet-like effect where successful modifications are maintained until they can be improved upon. There has been great interest in the topic of cumulative cultural evolution from researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, but un...

Cultural ecology

Human groups with no culture or communication cannot exist. this essay addresses changes in the concept of development, as it relates to culture and communication, as a new reference point for practical applications of development and cooperation among nations. the idea of development has changed. economic development has evolved to mean sustainable human development. this shift in meaning repr...

Evolutionary demography of age at last birth: integrating approaches from human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution

Cultural evolutionary theory and human behavioural ecology offer different, but compatible approaches to understanding human demographic behaviour. For much of their 30 history, these approaches have been deployed in parallel, with few explicit attempts to integrate them empirically. In this paper, we test hypotheses drawn from both approaches to explore how reproductive behaviour responds to c...

Human Development: Cross-cultural Approaches

Findings from psychological research on human development carried out primarily in Western cultures may not be universally valid. Research in other cultures reveal hitherto unknown facts and processes. Thus, a cross-cultural approach provides an essential contribution to the understanding of developmental processes and the influence of genetic and environmental factors, for example universals a...

History and Human Nature: Cross-cultural Universals and Cultural Relativities