cultural evolution – Page 5

How Culture Shaped The Human Genome

The study of culture, cultural evolution, gene-culture coevolution and niche construction have all received much more attention over the last decade. So it’s nice to see Nature taking on-board a fascinating review by Kevin Laland, John Odling-Smee and Sean Myles about how culture shaped the human genome: bringing genetics and the human sciences together. It’s really worth reading for anyone interested in the interactions between biology and culture. In particular, I was pleased to see them put forward the notion of culture having accelerated recent evolution, contra Stephen J. Gould’s claim that “there’s been no biological change in humans for 40,000 or 50,000 years”. Here’s the abstract:

Researchers from diverse backgrounds are converging on the view that human evolution has been shaped by gene–culture interactions. Theoretical biologists have used population genetic models to demonstrate that cultural processes can have a profound effect on human evolution, and anthropologists are investigating cultural practices that modify current selection. These findings are supported by recent analyses of human genetic variation, which reveal that hundreds of genes have been subject to recent positive selection, often in response to human activities. Here, we collate these data, highlighting the considerable potential for cross-disciplinary exchange to provide novel insights into how culture has shaped the human genome.

Some links #1

Having now returned, I feel a long list of links is needed to kick start things:

The journal Biolinguistics now has a blog. Whether or not this turns out to be interesting will obviously depend on the role they adopt for the blog. At the moment it just seems to be promoting various conferences and a summer school. I’ve added their RSS to google reader, so we shall see if anything worth while pops up.
Peter Frost over at Evo and Proud has written a fascinating article about the late Claude Lévi-Strauss and his view that “cultural differences have, over time, produced biological differences”.
Babel’s Dawn is producing a ridiculous amount of insightful articles. In particular, you should check out: Is anything universal in language? It covers a great paper (click here for a draft copy) by Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson, which knocks down the perpetuated myth of language universals.
Be sure to check out The Adventures of Auck, a blog by a friend, and fellow Welshman, at Edinburgh University. He’s written two insightful pieces on colour perception in bilinguals. Part one and part two.
Hat tip to Shared Symbolic Storage for directing me towards a review of Michael Tomasello‘s book Why we cooperate? My personal view: it’s a by-product of our ability to coordinate perception and behaviour (but that’s for a future post).
Edge poses the question: How is the internet changing the way you think? Plenty of good responses. Particularly amusing was Andy Clark’s reply: What kind of dumb question is that?

Right, that’s all I’ve got time for at the moment. Laptop battery is dying and my bladder is urging me towards the toilet.

Cultaptation Conference

Earlier this year I went along to the Cultaptation Conference at St Andrews. Despite being a fascinating event, there appears to nothing on the blogsphere pertaining to the speakers and their talks. In fact, this generally holds true for cultural evolution: there are no dedicated blogs reporting what is undoubtedly a serious scientific endeavour. As a remedy I’m going to dedicate several future blog posts to the conference. Until then, here are the talk abstracts for some of my personal highlights:

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Reading Round Up

Here’s some stuff I’ve been reading over the last month or so:

Babel’s Dawn discusses Michael Arbib’s paper, Invention and Community in the Emergence of Language: Insights from New Sign Languages.
Over at Neurophilosophy there is an overview of a fascinating paper on the Universal Grammar of birdsong (also check out my comment, it’s the first one under JW).
John Hawks talks about some of my favourite topics: learning, population size, and modern human behaviour.
The recent resurgence of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Lera Boroditsky are the topics of discussion over at Mind Hacks.
Deric Bownds’ MindBlog mentions the “origins of altruism toward one’s own social group and the emergence of cultural complexity“.
Evolution can occur in less than 10 years… In guppy fish.
Researchers at Brown find: “A front portion of the brain that handles tasks like decision-making also helps decipher different phonetic sounds“.
And lastly, Dienekes’ anthropology blog discusses a paper that investigates the role of drift and selection in the shaping of human skulls, concluding “that neutral processes have been much more important than climate in shaping the human cranium”.

Okay, so that brings you up to date with my reading from May through to July. Next round up will cover August. How fascinating :-/

How do biology and culture interact?

In the year of Darwin, I’m not too surprised at the number of articles being published on the interactions between cultural change and biological evolution — this synthesis, if achieved, will certainly be a crucial step in explaining how humans evolved. Still, it’s unlikely we’re going to see the Darwin of culture in 2009, given we’re still disputing some of the fundamentals surrounding these two modes of evolution. One of these key arguments is whether or not culture inhibits biological evolution. That we’re seeing accelerated changes in the human genome seems to suggest (for some) that culture is one of these evolutionary selection pressures, as John Hawks explains:
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Current Issues in Language Evolution

As part of my assessment this term I’m to write four mock peer-reviewed items for a module called Current Issues in Language Evolution. It’s a great module run by Simon Kirby, examining some of the best food for thought in the field. Alone this is an interesting endeavour, after all we’re right in the middle of a language evolution renaissance, however, even cooler are the lectures, where students get to do their own presentations on a particular paper. I already did my presentation at the start of this term, on Dediu and Ladd’s paper, which went rather well, even if one of my slip ups did not go unnoticed (hint: always label the graphs). So, over the next few weeks, in amongst additional posts covering some of the presentations in class, I’ll hopefully be writing articles on these four five papers:

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