Histories of evolutionary thought are dominated by organic evolution. The colossus in our midst that is evolutionary biology casts its shadow over history, making it appear that what is so widespread and important today was always the primary subject of evolutionary speculation. Thus many histories assume that the core meaning of evolution is the change of organic life and that other forms of e...

How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know! Follow this and additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds Part of the African American Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Multicultural Psychology Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Quantitative, Qual...

The use of biological models and metaphors in studies of culture has a long and checkered history. While there are many superficial similarities between biological and cultural evolution, attempts to pin down such analogies have not been wholly successful. One limiting factor may be a lack of empirical evidence that the basic assumptions of the evolutionary model are met within a cultural syste...

The present study is a cross-cultural comparison of typical dreams of “being chased” between Tibetan and Han Chinese dreamers. The research is based on 208 interviews combined with responses to a Dream Questionnaire. In total 569 subjects were involved in the research project: 278 Tibetan and 291 Han undergraduate college students. Results show an overall occurrence of a being-chased dream in 9...

Camporesi integrates into his account insights from social and cultural anthropology (not least, Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas), and maintains a wholesome balance between a concern with the symbolic meaning of the cultural systems of the flesh, food, etc., and, on the other hand, a more materialist account banausically concerned with what people ate, what made them sick, and what they died of. ...

Optimization problems arise in many real-world applications. Cultural Algorithms are a class of computational models derived from observing the cultural evolution process in nature, compared with genetic algorithm the cultural algorithms have high convergence speed. Aiming at the disadvantages of basic cultural algorithms like being trapped easily into a local optimum, this paper improves the b...