Lecture 11 Flashcards
How is culture related to evolutionary psychology
Culture is a characteristic feature of the human species - a fundamental part of our behaviour. Culture is often seen as unique to the human species, thus evolutionary psychologists want to know why we have it, what it is for and how it works.
Is culture what makes us human?
There is evidence for cultural tramission in other animals, for example chimpanzees (who we are most closely related to) Whiten et al, 1999. They analysed 39 behaviours over 151 years (termite fishing, courtship rituals etc). They found differences between populations can differ across boundaries which can’t be explained by ecological factors such as availability of suitable raw materials etc. They concluced that tranmission processes used by chimps have been/can be tested in controlled experiements too.
Do other animals exhibit culture?
Whiten et al found chimpanzees do. But the processes don’t always manifest themselves in the same way, or as complex as in humans.
What are the psychological processes and abilities underlying culture?
Psychologists argue that social learning is crucial for the development of cultural behaviour (Tomasello & Call, 1997). They found that individuals can learn from others through 3 methods.
- Stimulus enhancement - attention drawn to an object.
- Emulation - attention drawn to an object by the behaviour of another.
- Imitation (the most important, which focus on arbituary behaviours, those with no functional relevance, to demonstrate true imitation) - observer mimics another, thus allowing fast transmission.
However, anthropologists argue that a broader spectrum of behaviours are relevant and therefore go beyond imitation. They focus on teaching and enculturation and are less interested in the base psychological mechanisms. However, teaching may simply be guided imitiaton!
Why is learning through imitaiton or teaching a good idea?
It is faster than trial-and-error, and more efficient as if someone else has already learned it you can just imitate without the self-learning process. Barrett et al. (2002) said “each generation can stand on the shoulders of its predecessors”. However, if imitiation is such a good idea no one will act as an individual learner and thus there will be no one to imitate! But people might not be selective in their imitation, and/or individual learners might get special privledges (those who are famous or invent things often acquire more resources).
Can we identify the units of cultural transmission?
The biological evolution is based on the replicaiton of DNA.
Social scientists have resisted partitioning culture into component unites - they argue that culture operates as a whole.
There is comparisons between genetic evolution and cultural evolution - but similarities between them and the units they use (Barrett et al., 2002).
Is culture adaptive?
One way fitness is adaptive (has fitness benefits in life) is memes can have fitness - success with which a trait is propagated in future generations relative to other variats of a trait. But if there is no selection pressure - no one meme is more or less successful than others, and memes may be under neutral selection. However, some researchers have examined how cultural rules may help individuals reproduce more effectively. As well as this, we can see behavioural and genetic adaptations to Malaria (genetic adapation = sickle cell trait, where the frequency of this trait depends on the farming practices, behavioural adaptations include transhumance in Sardinia where livestock flock to lowlands in winter and highlands in summer.)
What is culture?
There is no strict definition of culture. Barret et al (2002) said it is the beliefs or rules of behaviour that are passed on from one individual to another by some form of social learning. Richerson & Boyd (2005) said culture is information capable of affecting individuals behaviour that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission.
What is a meme?
Dawkins coined the term in the motivation of seeing the cultural evolution in the sense of natural selection - to see the cultural evolution by using the perspectives in genetics. Defined the term as the new replicator or unit of cultural transmission or unit of imitation. Meme can be seen the way a cultural object is transmitted from one person to another in the perspective of virus of mind (Brodie, 1996; Lynch 1998). Memetics not only talk about the diffusion of cultural objects or system, but also the changes occurred to the spreading object as long as the contagions (Situngkir, 2004).
Discuss the findings of Weinsenfeld 1967 on sickle-cell trait
The sickle cell trait is a genetic adaptation to malaria. If you are heterozygous on the hemoglobin beta gene you are resistant to malaria, and if you are homozygous you have thalassernia which is a fatal blood condition. He found the frequency of this trait depends on the farming practices at that time - so higher frequency of sickle-cell trait occurs where yam farming occurs as trees are removed allowing pools of water to develop attracting mosquito’s.
What did Brown, 1986 find on behavioural adaptations in the Mediterranean?
Two genetic traits on the island of Sardinia that enhance fitness against Malaria. Found that transhumance affects the rates of malaria. So livestock flock to lowlands in winter, and highlands in summer. The highlands are mosquito free, but there is poor grazing for the animals - so there are strict rules on who can go into the malaria areas in summer (no women or children) but the meme manifests itself without knowledge. Anti-malaria strategies are an example of convergence of genetic and behavioural traits in the population.
Does cultural evolution happen without the influence of genes?
Memes may also be subject to their own selection, without a specific relationship to genetic factors - neutral selection, genetic drift. For example, the evolution of the teddy bear has been driven by predisposition to neotenous faces (Hinge & Barden 1985; Morris et al., 1995).
How does cultural evolution happen?
There are three approaches that differ in the extent to which culture is influenced by /interacts with genetic fitness.
- Extended phenotype models
- Phenogenotype Co-evolutionary models.
- The dual inheritance model.
What is the extended phenotype model?
An explanation of how cultural evolution happens. It suggests that genetic and memetic fitnesses are seen as closely correlated to cultural evolution. Cultergens are designed to increase specific elements of genetic fitness. The success of memes depends on how they affect the genetic fitness of the organism. Neurological processes develop sensitively in order to allow cultural elements to be conveyed. Modelled on host-parasite co-evolution. For example, language is a meme that evolved with the human brain.
Describe the phenogenotype co-evolutionary models
Genes and memes are semi-independent, they model the conditions that maximise the combined fitness of both (phenogenotype). There is mathematical models that take into account genotype and phenotype of parents and offspring. For example, the theoretical modelling of a sexually selected trait - the male sex ratio bias could co-evolve with social preference for sons.
Another example includes lactose intolerance (Durham, 1991) - most humans can’t digest lactose, but modern Europeans can. So there has been a genetic mutation to tolerate milk, which may have co-evolved with cattle keeping and vitamin D deficiencies. As well as this, sickle-cell trait spread was facilitated by yam farming but is a genetic mutation.
