Even though there is no agreed definition of what constitutes an ethnic group, there are a number of features that most academic treatments of the subject attribute to such groups: a proper collective name, shared myths of origin, and cultural characteristics, such as language, religion, traditions and customs that distinguish a given group from others. Different combinations of these features ...

In this paper, I argue that the adaptive fit between human cultures and their environment is persuasive evidence that some form of evolutionary mechanism has been important in driving human cultural change. I distinguish three mechanisms of cultural evolution: niche construction leading to cultural group selection; the vertical flow of cultural information from parents to their children, and th...

Culture pervades human life and is at the origin of the success of our species. A wide range of other animals have culture too, but often in a limited form that does not complexify through the gradual accumulation of innovations. We developed a new paradigm to study cultural evolution in primates in order to better evaluate our closest relatives' cultural capacities. Previous studies using tran...

With introduction of social niche effects into a model of cultural change, the frequency of a practice cannot predict the frequency of its underlying belief. The combination of a general model with empirical data from a specific case illustrates the importance of collaboration between modellers and field researchers, and identifies the type of quantitative data necessary for analysing case stud...

Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two d...

Water management is facing major challenges due to increasing uncertainties caused by climate and global change and by fast changing socio-economic boundary conditions. More attention has to be devoted to understanding and managing the transition from current management regimes to more adaptive regimes that take into account environmental, technological, economic, institutional and cultural cha...

Address behavior is governed by politeness phenomenon which is culturally bound. This paper attempts to draw a cross-cultural comparison between Chinese and English address forms and, going beneath the surface, explore the cultural differences in value systems and their underlying philosophical sources. The study will help people develop a fuller understanding of the meanings of the address ter...

Human language is composed of sequences of reusable elements. The origins of the sequential structure of language is a hotly debated topic in evolutionary linguistics. In this paper, we show that sets of sequences with language-like statistical properties can emerge from a process of cultural evolution under pressure from chunk-based memory constraints. We employ a novel experimental task that ...

There is growing use of management assessment centres within parts of New South Wales Health. The present study examined outcome benefits from managers who participated in the Australasian Management Competencies Assessment Centre, some 123 staff from one rural and one metropolitan area health service. Results confirmed greater use of personal development plans and increased attendance at conti...