Chimp encounters a peanut in the bottom of a transparent tube. Chimp cannot move the tube. Chimp cannot reach into the tube. Look how the clever bugger solves it.
With thanks to Greg Laden for the original post
Archive for February, 2008
Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution
Mesoudi et al 2004
Who’s it by? Alex Mesoudi, a psychologist with an interest in modelling cultural evolution. Andrew Whiten, a psychologist and primatologist, most famous for the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis, and Kevin Laland, a biologist with an interest in animal social learning, cultural evolution and niche construction.
What’s it about? Mesoudi et al neatly outline the relationship between cultural evolution and biological evolution, and explore the different methodologies for analysing and modelling cultural evolution.
Why should an evolutionary linguist care? Unless you are only obsessed with the biological basis for languag, then culture is likely to play an important role in any account of language evolution. It may account for many of the features of language that Chomskian accounts have presumed are innate. It also represents a parallel and fascinating area for evolutionary explorations to move into.
Anyway, here is Erin Brown’s excellent presentation on the paper.
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