Evolutionary Anthropology

Foraging society organization: A simple model of a complex transition

by Dwight Read

Published in European Journal of Operational Research 30 (1987] 230-236

The evolutionary development of the hominids that culminated in the appearance of Homo
sapiens included the... more The evolutionary development of the hominids that culminated in the appearance of Homo
sapiens included the subdivision of the species into societies on the basis of culturally, instead of
biologically, constructed differentiation. It is argued that this change must have occurred after the
mental ability to formulate and culturally express conceptual structures of extended relationships
had been biologically introduced, and that intergroup competition within a species provided the
selective impetus for this more complex form of organization. The combination of conceptual
structures for organization at a more extensive scale and the effects of intergroup competition
would lead to a restructuring of the whole species into society like groups.

From population to organization thinking

by Dwight Read

Authors: Lane, David, Univ.Modena & Reggio;
Maxfield, Robert, Stanford University;
Read, Dwight W, University of California, Los Angeles;
van der Leeuw, Sander E, Arizona State University

Published in: D. Lane et al. (eds.), Complexity Perspectives in Innovation and Social Change,
Methodos Series 7, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-9663-1 2, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
2009

This chapter begins by reviewing the Darwinian account of biological innovation, which is based on what Ernst Mayr... more This chapter begins by reviewing the Darwinian account of biological innovation, which is based on what Ernst Mayr calls “population thinking” and posits two kinds of key mechanisms underlying the innovation process, variation and selection. The chapter then argues that the increasingly popular tendency to adapt this account to provide the foundations for a theory of human sociocultural innovation is ill-advised. Human sociocultural organizations are self-reflexive and self-modifying, through negotiation processes that can lead to transformations
in organizational structure and functionality, including the essential activities of recruitment, differentiation and coordination. Innovation in these organizations is accomplished through processes of organizational transformation, and to understand how these work, “organization thinking” rather than “population thinking” is required. The fundamental questions that organization thinking addresses include the following: What is social organization? How are particular social organizations constructed, maintained, and transformed? What kinds of functionality do social organizations support, and how do they create new functionality? In addressing these questions,
the chapter describes a bootstrapping dynamic, whereby organizations generate new functionality, which is instantiated in activities that in turn generate new organizations.

DARWINIAN EVOLUTION – BROAD ENOUGH FOR CULTURE?

by Dwight Read

Co-authored with David Lane. Published in Anthropology Today 24(2), 2008.

The difficulty social and cultural anthropologists
have had with developing a unifying
theory about cultural... more The difficulty social and cultural anthropologists
have had with developing a unifying
theory about cultural systems, their relationship
to human behaviour, and how they change
through time stems from the complexity of
modelling self-modifying systems, not from
failure to embed the enterprise in a Darwinian
evolutionary framework as argued by Mesoudi
et al.

Misyurov D.A. Dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas // Credo New. 2012. №2

by Dmitry Misyurov

The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with... more The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with dominant and the non-dominant elements; universal formula; formula with symbolic weight of elements; tautological formula. For example, it suggests an opportunity to use the dialectical formulas for modeling and artificial intelligence creation, etc.

Applied Evolutionary Epistemology: A new method to enhance interdisciplinary research between the life and human sciences.

by Nathalie Gontier

pdf download here: http://kairos.fc.ul.pt/nr%204/Applied%20Evolutionary%20Epistemology.pdf

Cultural Phylogenetics of the Tupi Language Family in Lowland South America

by Curtis Atkisson

Background
Recent advances in automated assessment of basic vocabulary lists allow the construction of linguistic... more Background
Recent advances in automated assessment of basic vocabulary lists allow the construction of linguistic phylogenies useful for tracing dynamics of human population expansions, reconstructing ancestral cultures, and modeling transition rates of cultural traits over time.

Methods
Here we investigate the Tupi expansion, a widely-dispersed language family in lowland South America, with a distance-based phylogeny based on 40-word vocabulary lists from 48 languages. We coded 11 cultural traits across the diverse Tupi family including traditional warfare patterns, post-marital residence, corporate structure, community size, paternity beliefs, sibling terminology, presence of canoes, tattooing, shamanism, men's houses, and lip plugs.

Results/Discussion
The linguistic phylogeny supports a Tupi homeland in west-central Brazil with subsequent major expansions across much of lowland South America. Consistently, ancestral reconstructions of cultural traits over the linguistic phylogeny suggest that social complexity has tended to decline through time, most notably in the independent emergence of several nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. Estimated rates of cultural change across the Tupi expansion are on the order of only a few changes per 10,000 years, in accord with previous cultural phylogenetic results in other language families around the world, and indicate a conservative nature to much of human culture.

Nest-building orangutans demonstrate engineering know-how to produce safe, comfortable beds

by Adam van Casteren

Adam van Casteren, William I. Sellers, Susannah K. S. Thorpe, Sam Coward, Robin H. Crompton, Julia P. Myatt, and A. Roland Ennos

PNAS (2012) 109 6873-6877

Nest-building orangutans must daily build safe and comfortable nest structures in the forest canopy and do this... more Nest-building orangutans must daily build safe and comfortable nest structures in the forest canopy and do this quickly and effectively using the branches that surround them. This study aimed to investigate the mechanical design and architecture of orangutan nests and determine the degree of technical sophistication used in their construction. We measured the whole nest compliance and the thickness of the branches used and recorded the ways in which the branches were fractured. Branch samples were also collected from the nests and subjected to three-point bending tests to determine their mechanical properties. We demonstrated that the center of the nest is more compliant than the edges; this may add extra comfort and safety to the structure. During construction orangutans use the fact that branches only break half-way across in “greenstick” fracture to weave the main nest structure. They choose thicker branches with greater rigidity and strength to build the main structure in this way. They then detach thinner branches by following greenstick fracture with a twisting action to make the lining. These results suggest that orangutans exhibit a degree of technical knowledge and choice in the construction of nests.

Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates.

by Kit (Christopher) Opie

Shultz, S., Opie, C., and Atkinson, Q.D. (2011) Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates. Nature 479: 7372.

Although much attention has been focused on explaining and describing the diversity of social grouping patterns among... more Although much attention has been focused on explaining and describing the diversity of social grouping patterns among primates1, 2, 3, less effort has been devoted to understanding the evolutionary history of social living4. This is partly because social behaviours do not fossilize, making it difficult to infer changes over evolutionary time. However, primate social behaviour shows strong evidence for phylogenetic inertia, permitting the use of Bayesian comparative methods to infer changes in social behaviour through time, thereby allowing us to evaluate alternative models of social evolution. Here we present a model of primate social evolution, whereby sociality progresses from solitary foraging individuals directly to large multi-male/multi-female aggregations (approximately 52 million years (Myr) ago), with pair-living (approximately 16 Myr ago) or single-male harem systems (approximately 16 Myr ago) derivative from this second stage. This model fits the data significantly better than the two widely accepted alternatives (an unstructured model implied by the socioecological hypothesis or a model that allows linear stepwise changes in social complexity through time). We also find strong support for the co-evolution of social living with a change from nocturnal to diurnal activity patterns, but not with sex-biased dispersal. This supports suggestions that social living may arise because of increased predation risk associated with diurnal activity. Sociality based on loose aggregation is followed by a second shift to stable or bonded groups. This structuring facilitates the evolution of cooperative behaviours5 and may provide the scaffold for other distinctive anthropoid traits including coalition formation, cooperative resource defence and large brains.

Population growth, carrying capacity, and conflict

by Dwight Read

Co-authored with Steven A. LeBlanc. Published in Current Anthropology, 44(1), 2003, pp. 59-85

The standard model of population growth and regulation is critiqued.
It is argued that any model of population... more The standard model of population growth and regulation is critiqued.
It is argued that any model of population growth and regulation
must accommodate ten propositions, and a multitrajectory
model that does so is described. This model identifies
competition between groups, individual choice in reproductive
behavior, the scale for spatial and temporal variation in resource
abundance, and the social unit for resource access and ownership
as important components of population behavior.

Adeptos a la Adaptación: tres propuestas clasicas para la arqueología y una evaluación

by Vivian Scheinsohn

Published in Revista Antípoda 13, December 2011
In Spanish

Thirty years after Kirch (1980) seminal paper, this work reviews the role of adaptation in contemporary archaeological... more Thirty years after Kirch (1980) seminal paper, this work reviews the role of adaptation in contemporary archaeological thought and discusses its use. In this process, the use of this concept in biology will be examined as well as its use in archaeology, as it is incorporated in processualism, selectionism and Dual Inheritance theories. The author concludes with an evaluation of its current potential.

Reply to Henrich et al.: Behavioral variation needs to be quantified at multiple levels

by Shakti Lamba

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2012)

The tortoise and the ostrich egg: projecting the home base hypothesis into the 21st century

by Brian Stewart

2011 in Sept, J. and Pilbeam, D., 'Casting the net wide: papers in honor of Glynn Isaac and his studies on human origins', pp. 254-278. Co-authored with John Parkington and John W. Fisher Jr.

Introducing Universal Symbiogenesis

by Nathalie Gontier

In: O. Pombo et al. (eds.), Special Sciences and the Unity of Science. Series: Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science 24. Dordrecht Springer.
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2030-5 6,

Re-dating the Loss of Laryngeal Air Sacs in Homo Sapiens

by Richard Littauer

Terrell review of Cochrane 2009

by Ethan Cochrane

Review by John Terrell appearing in Archaeology in Oceania 45 (1):46

Egyptian Spit, “Intelligent Design,” and Other Tales of the Origin of the World

by Louise Krasniewicz

Intelligent Design proponents could learn a lesson from anthropology and mythology. Intelligent Design proponents could learn a lesson from anthropology and mythology.

Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., Kindler, L., 2012. Research perspectives for the study of Neanderthal subsistence strategies based on the analysis of archaeozoological assemblages. Quaternary International 247, 59-68.

by Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser

co-authored with Lutz Kindler

The discipline of archaeozoology holds the potential to considerably contribute to knowledge about the
social... more The discipline of archaeozoology holds the potential to considerably contribute to knowledge about the
social behaviour of Neandertals. However, the translation of proposed subsistence strategies into predictions about Neandertal social organisation still remains a challenge. The paper discusses the current state of archaeozoological research with respect to Neandertal subsistence. It is concluded that
the methodological research focus in archaeozoology has shifted from its original holistic perspective to
intensified/specialised studies of particular taphonomic components. The authors argue for a return to
a more holistic perspective to develop the full potential of archaeolozoology in order to obtain a comprehensive overall perspective of Neandertal social behaviour. Here, two avenues are suggested to reflate the processual character of taphonomy: 1. by conducting actualistic studies, which should serve to
test the homogeneity of a faunal assemblage; and 2. by concentrating on sites from ecologically welldefined
environments with high temporal resolution, such as interglacial sites.

6000 ago the Proto-Thracians Draw the Evolution of the Divine. – In: Courier of UNESCO, No 1, 1996

by Stefania Dimitrova

Words Can Speak Louder Than Actions

by Robert H. Gargett

Is reproductive synchrony an evolutionarily stable strategy for hunter-gatherers?

by Robert Foley

Foley, R A & Fitzgerald, C (1996) Is reproductive synchrony an evolutionarily stable strategy for hunter-gatherers? Current Anthropology 37 (3) 539-545

Knight's model of the role of reproductive synchrony in human female reproductive behaviour is tested through a... more Knight's model of the role of reproductive synchrony in human female reproductive behaviour is tested through a simulation model. Under conditions of high infant mortality it is unlikely that human females would benefit from a strategy of reproductive synchrony.