Cultural variation in a population is affected by the rate of occurrence of cultural innovations, whether such innovations are preferred or eschewed, how they are transmitted between individuals in the population, and the size of the population. An innovation, such as a modification in an attribute of a handaxe, may be lost or may become a property of all handaxes, which we call "fixation of th...

The Patient Safety Culture Improvement Tool (PSCIT) was developed to assist healthcare organizations in identifying practical actions to improve their culture. This article describes the development process of the PSCIT and provides a guide to using the PSCIT. The tool is based on a safety culture maturity model, which describes five stages of cultural evolution, from pathological to generative...

Since over a decade and ever more often we observe a clash between specific “new” living entities and the governance and regulation of (bio-)medical practices. These are the entities we call “bio-objects.” As will become clearer in the following, these bio-objects are indicators of a fundamental change between different systems of thought and practice: this is in the case of medicine the change...

Among the different factors associated to change in traditional ecological knowledge, the study of the relations between cultural change and traditional ecological knowledge has received scan and inadequate scholarly attention. Using data from indigenous peoples of an Amazonian society facing increasing exposure to the mainstream Bolivian society, we analyzed the relation between traditional ec...

This paper discusses two types of knowledge that are generated by cultural anthropology, narrative knowledge and scientific knowledge. The argument of this article is that narrative knowledge an older form of knowledge that dates to the time when the brain was evolving its capacity for cultural communication, and that scientific knowledge is more recent and depends on writing and other more ela...

Evolutionary developmental theories in biology see the processes and organization of organisms as crucial for understanding the dynamic behavior of organic evolution. Darwinian forces are seen as necessary but not sufficient for explaining observed evolutionary patterns. We here propose that the same arguments apply with even greater force to culture vis-à-vis cultural evolution. In order not t...

T HIS iS .A very interesting book. It is divided into two main sections one on the tubercle bacillus and one on laborator-y methods. The section on the tubercle bacillus gives a most interesting and comprehensive survey of the great amount of wvork that has been done on the characteristics of the organism-its mo)rphology, the cultural characteristics of its various types, its pathogenicity for ...

Evolutionary thinking can be applied to both cultural microevolution and macroevolution. However, much of the current literature focuses on cultural microevolution. In this article, we argue that the growing availability of large cross-cultural datasets facilitates the use of computational methods derived from evolutionary biology to answer broad-scale questions about the major transitions in h...

A key feature of the Regional Training Centres (RTCs) is the scope and nature of their engagement with decision-makers. While the RTCs may believe that they have an excellent association with decision-makers, is that belief shared? The authors of this paper draw on the results of a survey of decision-makers undertaken by the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF) as part of the pr...