more detailed, specific on beliefs

via u/Old_Interaction_9009 at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1fqxmt0/what_type_of_typewriter_did_i_buy_got_an_estate/lpt196b/

Snarky reference to "Royale with Cheese" from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (Miramax, 1994)

for - cultural phase transition - from feudalism to industrial age

cultural phase transition - from feudalism to industrial age - involved the interplay of a number of factors - cultural exchange of ideas between European and other cultures such as Islam and ancient Greek - colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade - new technologies such as steam engine rendered slaves obsolete by replacing them with more efficient factory systems of production - new human rights movements coincided to abolish slavery

for - adjacency - labour - creative force - cultural evolution - intent - emptiness

adjacency - between - Labour - cultural evolution - progress - progress trap - religion - emptiness - adjacency relationship - Labour is the result of collective agency over space and time - It is the collective effect of the motor control system of the societies of multi-cellular human INTERbeCOMings - driven by their collective intent - Losing sight of the sacred, and not understanding the saliency of emptiness, - we fall into progress traps, - of which commodified Labour is a major one

reading as a leading indicator of cultural shift to help provide power to women and non-whites.

Was the Great Books idea being pressed towards "men" a means of pushing back against this in some sense?

26:30 Brings up progress traps of this new technology

26:48

question How do we shift our (human being's) relationship with the rest of nature

27:00

metaphor - interspecies communications - AI can be compared to a new scientific instrument that extends our ability to see - We may discover that humanity is not the center of the universe

32:54

Question - Dr Doolittle question - Will we be able to talk to the animals? - Wittgenstein said no - Human Umwelt is different from others - but it may very well happen

34:54

species have culture - Marine mammals enact behavior similar to humans

• Unknown unknowns will likely move to known unknowns and to some known knowns

36:29

citizen science bioacoustic projects - audio moth - sound invisible to humans - ultrasonic sound - intrasonic sound - example - Amazonian river turtles have been found to have hundreds of unique vocalizations to call their baby turtles to safety out in the ocean

41:56

ocean habitat for whales - they can communicate across the entire ocean of the earth - They tell of a story of a whale in Bermuda can communicate with a whale in Ireland

43:00

progress trap - AI for interspecies communications - examples - examples - poachers or eco tourism can misuse

44:08

progress trap - AI for interspecies communications - policy

45:16

whale protection technology - Kim Davies - University of New Brunswick - aquatic drones - drones triangulate whales - ships must not get near 1,000 km of whales to avoid collision - Canadian government fines are up to 250,000 dollars for violating

50:35

environmental regulation - overhaul for the next century - instead of - treatment, we now have the data tools for - prevention

56:40 - ecological relationship - pollinators and plants have co-evolved

1:00:26

AI for interspecies communication - example - human cultural evolution controlling evolution of life on earth

for - key insight - gainful employment of white working class led to cultural backlash and shift from left to far-right - to - Neoliberalism and the Far-Right: A Contradictory Embrace

key insight - gainful employment of white working class led to cultural backlash and shift from left to far-right - source - Davidson and Saul

to - Neoliberalism and the Far-Right: A Contradictory Embrace - https://hyp.is/8Hf0lDzqEe-KM9dQxJDxsw/core.ac.uk/download/pdf/84148846.pdf

indeed 😬

Is it possible to be above one's own system of beliefs and ideas? Doesn't the system make them a product of it? Evolving from a base at best?

The idea sounds lovely, but is it possible anthropologically?

note here, again, the idea of culture as "capital":

culture can make you better than other people

some of the cultural democratization at that time presumed free time as well as conscious choice to make the effort... what about those who have patience for neither?

what about the economic choices to participate or not?

note that the use of "capital" with respect to culture commodifies it and frames it in an economic context here.

How is one to earn and then later spend this capital? How might it be quantified?

She talks about people's views of her in Japan.

She felt a sense of estrangement, acutely aware of her mother's "Japaneseness" and the feeling that "wherever I go, I'm always different."

for - quote - progress trap - speed of cultural evolution - Ray Noble

for - progress trap - post comment - LinkedIn - Ralph Thurn article - progress trap - adjacency - progress trap - maladaptive - attention - focus of attention - cultural evolution - duality - dualism - dualistic

adjacency - between - progress - progress trap - maladaptive - cultural evolution - attention - focus of attention - Exploring this statement further, it isn't just that it is our dualistic thinking applied here is a problem - but that it is the very nature of human analytic reasoning coupled with our innate ability to focus our attention which requires a deep unpacking - For to focus on an object of attention - is something we can only accomplish by defocusing on everything else - Indeed, it is the very act of attention on the one, that is inextricably accompanied by the act of inattention of the many - Our body, and that of many other organisms is evolutionarily designed - to focus our attention in our field of view on emergent phenomena that is salient to our survival - The nature of reductionist-type research - which is to say, most research - is that we continue applying this evolved adaptive behavior, even though cultural evolution (ie. progress) has accelerated exponentially to such an extent - that this same biologically evolved behavior has become maladaptive in the context of modernity

relationship of this area of law with respect to debt and David Graeber's Debt theses?

for - litigation terrorism - ISDS - corporate tribunal system - Michael Levin - multi-scale competency architecture - example - adjacency - evolutionary biology - corporate law - climate crisis

adjacency - between - corporate law - climate crisis - evolutionary biology - cultural evolution - adjacency statement - Biologist Michael Levin's multi-scale competency architecture of evolutionary biology seems to apply here - in the field of corporate law - Corporations can be viewed as one level of a social superorganism in a cultural evolution process - Governments can be viewed similiarly, but at a higher level - The ISDS is being weaponized by the same corporations destroying the global environment to combat the enactment of government laws that pose a threat to their livelihood - Hence, the ISDS has been reconfigured to protect the destroyers of the environment so that they can avoid dealing with their unacceptable externalizations - The individual existing at the lower level of the multi-scale competency architecture(the corporation) is battling to survive against the wishes of the higher level individual (the government) in the same multi-scale competency architecture

https://news.virginia.edu/content/old-card-catalog-collaborative-effort-will-preserve-its-history The Old Card Catalog: Collaborative Effort Will Preserve Its History<br /> December 9, 2019 By Anne E. Bromley, anneb@virginia.edu <br /> Photos By Sanjay Suchak, sanjay@virginia.edu

Cultural hegemony refers to domination or rule maintained through ideological or cultural means. [Antonio Gramsci (https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-gramsci-3026471) argued that consent to the rule of the dominant group is achieved by the spread of ideologies through social institutions.

Cultural Hegemony, or our tacit agreement with the way that things are; is a result of socialization, our experiences with social institutions, and our exposure to cultural narratives and imagery, all of which reflect the beliefs and values of the ruling class

Organización de la información en la tecnología. ¿Quién o cómo se define el monopolio de la información?

the collective "we" here must broadly be the West, but even there our values, ethics, and morals aren't all the same. Things devolve further and more quickly beyond the cis-gendered white male perspective which Joy represents here.

for - quote - Sarah Stein Lubrano - quote - self as cultural construction in WEIRD culture - sense of self

quote - (immediately below)

• It's just a weird fascination of our weird culture that
  • we think the self is there and
  • it's the best and most likely explanation for human behavior
• Other people in other cultures do not think this
• and that suggests that our sense of self is largely culturally constructed

discussion - sense of self is complex. See the work of - Michael Levin and - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=michael+levin - Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=major+evolutionary+transition+in+individuality

for - multi scale competency architecture - Michael Levin - evolutionary biology - rapid whole system change - adjacency - multi scale competency architecture - rapid whole system change - stop reset go - Deep Humanity - Indyweb - Indranet - major evolutionary transition in individuality - MET - superorganism - cumulative cultural evolution of individuality

adjacency - between - multi scale competency architecture - rapid whole system change - progress trap - stop reset go - Deep Humanity - Indyweb - Indranet - major evolutionary transition in individuality - MET - superorganism - cumulative cultural evolution of individuality - adjacency statement - The idea of multi scale competency architecture can be extended to apply to the cultural level. - in the context of humanity's current existential poly /meta/ perma crisis, - rapid whole system change - (a cultural behavioural paradigm shift) - is required within a few short years - to avoid the worst impacts of - catastrophic, - anthropogenic - climate change, which is entangled with a host of other earth system boundary violations including - biodiversity loss - fresh water scarcity - - the driver of evolution through major evolutionary transitions in individuality has given rise to the level of cultural superorganisms that include all previous levels - progress and its intended consequences of progress traps play a major role in determining the future evolutionary trajectory of our and many other species - our species is faced with a few choice permutations in this regard: - individually regulate behaviour aligned with a future within earth system boundaries - collectively regulate behaviour aligned with a future within earth system boundaries - pursue sluggish green growth / carbon transition that is effectively tinkering at the margins of rapid whole system change - BAU - currently, there doesn't appear to be any feasible permutation of any of the above choices - There is insufficient worldview alignment to create the unity at scale for report whole system change - individual incumbent state and corporate actors still cling too tightly to the old, destructive regime, - creating friction that keeps the actual rate of change below the required - Stop Reset Go, couched within the Deep Humanity praxis and operationalized through the Indyweb / Indranet individual / collective open learning system provides a multi-dimensional tool for a deep educational paradigm shift that can accelerate both individual and collective upregulation of system change

• for: adjacency - problem solving - governance sectors - cultural evolution

• adjacency between

  • governance sectors
  • problem solving
  • cultural evolution
• adjacency statement
  • Governance sectors culturally evolved to reflect different problem-solving approaches

Hans Steinmüller: Comparaciones implícitas o por qué es inevitable estudiar a China en perspectiva comparada

site:: [[Facebook]] date:: 2023-04-18 author:: [[Hans Steinmüller]] url:: https://www.facebook.com/IDAES/videos/1399579184127619 accessed:: 2023-12-29

The problem is that the material of such a World Encyclopedia would need to be believed as truth. Many in 2023 certainly don't believe in science, much less "truth". Its a complicated issue of identity, mass movements, and belief systems. Something which might be teased apart by cultural anthropologists?

Untangling Threads by Erin Kissane on 2023-12-21

This immediately brings up the questions of how the following - founder effects and being overwhelmed by the scale of an eternal September - communism of community interactions being subverted bent for the purposes of (surveillance) capitalism (see @Graeber2011, Debt)

• for: cumulative cultural evolution (CCE)

https://ctva.biz/US/TalkShow/RegisPhilbin_1981-82.htm

According to @Young1982, they had previously appeared with Regis Philbin on AM Los Angeles (TV show).

Another beautifully put paragraph.

Jameson is dealing with the objections, that we encounter too, about creating "periods" (aka stages or phases or paradigms in our onto-social contexts). Because, of course, in any study of cultural phenomena and cultural evolution there are no completely sharp breaks. It is always, at least when zoomed in, evolution rather than revolution.

But that misses the point. Good theoretical (e.g. dynamical systems theory) and empirical reasons suggest that we do have more discrete changes.

His second point is that this genealogical not linear. - it is branching and refolding Again of course, though a simplified genealogy is a linear one (e.g. the kings/queens of England).

https://werd.io/2023/doing-it-all

Interesting to see what, in generations past, might have been a gendered (female) striving for "having it all" (entailing time with children, family and a career) has crossed over into the masculine space.

Sounds like Ben's got some basic priorities set, which is really the only thing necessary. Beyond this, every parent, especially of new babies, in the W.E.I.R.D. culture is tired. By this measurement he's doing it "right". What is missing is an interpersonal culture around him of extended family and immediate community of daily interaction to help normalize his conditions. Missing this he's attempting to replace the lack of experience with this area by reaching out to his online community, which may provide a dramatically different and biased sample.

Some of the "it takes a village" (to raise a child) still operates on many facets, but dramatically missing is the day-to-day direct care and help that many parents need.

Our capitalistic culture has again, in this case of parenting in the W.E.I.R.D. world, managed to privatize the profits and socialize the losses. Here the losses in Ben's case are on his physical well-being (tiredness) and his mental state wondering if his case is "normal". A further loss is the erosion of his desire for a family unit and cohesion of community which the system is attempting to sever by playing on his desire to "have it all". Giving in to the pull of work at the expense of family only drives the system closer to collapse.

• for: example - cultural destruction - Jawara - cigarettes and alcohol, example - indigenous genocide, example - forced addiction

• comment

• example - cultural destruction
• example - indigenous genocide
• example: forced addiction
  • Growing up in Canada in an indigenous community, this struck a nerve.In my childhood, I experience how the Haida first nations people of the Queen Charlotte Islands were reduced from a once proud and self-reliant culture to a dependent one living in government housing, the land they lived on denied to them and forced to live on small parcels of "Indian Reservations", their dignity stripped, and made dependent on alcohol and cigarettes.
  • It seems that modernity is simply an arrogant and corrupting force on indigeneity.
  • We see the beginning of indigenous genocide by the attempted infection by ignorant modern citizens who interact with the Jawara by attempting to hook them on the extremely destructive and addictive substances of our culture, alcohol and cigarettes

• for: cultural destruction - Jawara - poachers, modernity - disruption of ecological cycle, example - ecosystem disruption

• comment

• example: ecosystem disruption
• example: human cultural ecosystem in balance
• the uncontrolled influence of the outside world always follows. Governments are too shortsighted to understand that this always happens and feel they can control the situation. They cannot. Greed breeds resourcefulness
  • In a matter of years, poachers have disrupted the Jawara's traditional diet, forcing them to overhunt deer and disrupt the entire ecological cycle that existed up until then.It's an example of how modernity ruthlessly and rapidly disrupts ecosystems. In this case, ecosystems where humans have integrated in a balanced way.

• for: cross-cultural dialogue - jawara and modernity,

• commentary

  • the tragedy of such myopic relationships and exploitation is that we miss the opportunity to hold cross-cultural dialogues to explore what happens when two human cultures that have developed in isolation meet for the first time.
  • the marvel of modern lights to the Jawara, and their quick embrace of it and expression of wonder is reminiscent of the chronicles of earlier European explorers/colonizers who exposed modern inventions and cultural artefacts to aboriginals many centuries earlier

• for: interesting idea - project to shift consciousness in Alberta

• comment

• interesting idea: project to shift consciousness in Alberta
  • When there is a surplus use it to spend a billion dollars over the next 10 years, 100 million each year given away in 10 million dollar tranches
  • communities of approx. 15,000 people can apply for the 10 million dollar grant to raise consciousness and understand the modernity frame they currently unconsciously live within
  • in order to change the system, you have to first be aware of it and how that system is in you
  • This is an evolutionary experiment because nobody has tried to change a complex system like this before

• for: cultural evolution - diverse movements, cultural transition - diverse movements

• summary

  • Bill Reese and Rubin Nelson believe that the dynamic / relational quadrant of indigenous culture is the most viable futures

• for: major cultural paradigms, modernity - leaving, cultural transition, cultural evolution, MET, Major Evolutionary Transition, kiey insight - 4 major cultural paradigms

• comment

• key insight: 4 major cultural paradigms

  • This matrix doesn't quite capture what Ruben is proposing because he later talks about neo-indigenous, which means taking elements of modernity but within an overall indigenous framework, so a hybrid
  • It would be worth exploring implications for an evolutionary framework of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET)

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Updated and Expanded. 2011. Reprint, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2021. https://amzn.to/3MPHKaZ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysis)

relationship with context collapse

Presentism bias enters biblical and religious studies when, by way of context collapse, readers apply texts written thousands of years ago and applicable to one context to their own current context without any appreciation for the intervening changes. Many modern Christians (especially Protestants) show these patterns. There is an interesting irony here because Protestantism began as the Catholic church was reading too much into the Bible to create practices like indulgences.)

—Alexander von Humboldt, 1807 “Essay on the Geography of Plants”

Cave paintings/art were known of in Humboldt's time certainly if he's using them to analogize.

• for: social superorganism - vs human multicellular being, social superorganism, Homni, major evolutionary transition, MET, MET in Individuality, Indyweb, Indranet, Indyweb/Indranet, CCE cumulative cultural evolution, symmathesy, Gyuri Lajos, individual/collective gestalt, interwingled sensemaking, Deep Humanity, DH, meta crisis, meaning crisis, polycrisis

• comment

  • True, there is no physical cohesion that binds human beings together into a larger organism, but there is another dimension - informational cohesion.
  • This informational cohesion expresses itself in cumulative cultural evolution. Even this very discussion they are having is an example of that
  • The social superorganism is therefore composed of an informational body and not a physical one and one can think of its major mentations as collective, consensual ideas such as popular memes, movements, governmental or business actions and policies
  • I slept on this and this morning, realized how salient Adam's question was to my own work
    • The comments here build and expand upon what I thought yesterday (my original annotations)
    • The main connections to my own sense-making work are:
      • Within our specific human species, the deep entanglement between self and other (the terminology that our Deep Humanity praxis terms the "individual / collective gestalt")
      • The Deep Humanity / SRG claim that the concurrent meaning / meta / poly crisis may be an evolutionary test foreshadowing the next possible Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality.<br /> - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=MET+in+Individuality
        • As Adam notes, collective consciousness may be more a metaphorical rather than a literal so a social superorganism, (one reference refers to it as Homni
          • https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140701-the-superorganism-engulfing-earth
        • may be metaphorical only as this higher order individual lacks the physical signaling system to create a biological coherence that, for instance, an animal body possesses.
        • Nevertheless, the informational connections do exist that bind individual humans together and it is not trivial.
        • Indeed, this is exactly what has catapulted our species into modernity where our cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has defined the concurrent successes and failures of our species. Modernity's meaning / meta / polycrisis and progress traps are a direct result of CCE.
        • Humanity's intentions and its consequences, both intended and unintended are what has come to shape the entire trajectory of the biosphere. So the impacts of human CCE are not trivial at all. Indeed, a paper has been written proposing that human information systems could be the next Major System Transition (MST) that could lead to another future MET that melds biotic and abiotic
          • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=MST+-+information
          • or https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556&group=world
        • This circles back to Adam's question and what has just emerged for me is this question:
          • Is it possible that we could evolve in some kind of hybrid direction where we are biologically still separate individuals BUT deeply intertwingled informationally through CCE and something like the theoretical Indyweb/Indranet which is an explicit articulation of our theoretical informational connectivity?
          • In other words, could "collective consciousness be explicitly defined in terms of an explicit, externalized information system reflecting intertwingled individual/collective learning?
      • The Indyweb / Indranet informational laminin protein / connective tissue that informationally binds individuals to others in an explicit, externalized means of connecting the individual informational nodes of the social superorganism, giving it "collective consciousness" (whereas prior to Indyweb / Indranet, this informational laminin/connective tissue was not systematically developed so all informational connection, for example of the existing internet, is incomplete and adhoc)
      • The major trajectory paths that global or localized cultural populations take can become an indication of the behavior of collective consciousness.
        • Voting, both formal and informal is an expression of consensus leading to consensual behavior and the consensual behavior could be a reflection of Homni's collective consciousness

• insight

  • While socially annotating this video, a few insights occurred after last night's sleep:
    • Hypothes.is lacks timebound sequence granularity. Indyweb / Indranet has this feature built in and we need it for social annotation. Why? All the information within this particular annotation cannot be machine sorted into a time series. As the social annotator, I actually have to point out which information came first, second, etc. This entire comment, for instance was written AFTER the original very short annotation. Extra tags were updated to reflect the large comment.
    • I gained a new realization of the relationship and intertwingularity of individual / collective learning while writing and reflecting on this social annotation. I think it's because of Adam's question that really revolves around MET of Individuality and the 3 conversant's questioning of the fluid and fuzzy boundary between "self" and "other"
      • Namely, within Indyweb / Indranet there are two learning pillars that make up the entirety of external sensemaking:
        • the first is social annotation of the work of others
        • the second is our own synthesis of what we learned from others (ie. our social annotations)
      • It is the integration of these two pillars that is the sum of our sensemaking parts. Social annotations allow us to sample the edge of the sensemaking work of others. After all, when we ingest one specific information source of others, it is only one of possibly many. Social annotations reflect how our whole interacts with their part. However, we may then integrate that peripheral information of the other more deeply into our own sensemaking work, and that's where we must have our own central synthesizing Indyweb / Indranet space to do that work.
      • It is this interplay between different poles that constitute CCE and symmathesy, mutual learning.
      • adjacency between
        • Indyweb / Indranet name space
        • Indranet
        • automatic vs manual references / citations
      • adjacency statement
        • Oh man, it's so painful to have to insert all these references and citations when Indranet is designed to do all this! A valuable new meme just emerged to express this:
          • Pain between the existing present situation and the imagined future of the same si the fuel that drives innovation.

• quote: Gien

  • Pain between an existing present situation and an imagined, improved future is the fuel that drives innovation.
• date: 2023, Nov 8

While true, I don't think the underlying evil as such played a role in whether a philosophy arose from ancient Rome, but having a large enough layer of society that can afford spending time musing and thinking or be an audience for that thinking. The source of that wealth isn't a cause even though the wealth is a prerequisite to free up time and energy. The extraction made that possible of course, and it is not much different now. BigTech probably feels resonance because it's a global extractive industry too. I remember from my Latin at school how we would read texts by certain authors where they made some nuanced ethical point, while in the same text never bothering to question slavery. Or even in the same paragraph along the lines of "you need to treat slaves as human beings", except for the keeping them enslaved part ofcourse.

There's something here about cultural appropriation across eras. The Renaissance did, claiming the mantle of the Roman civiliisation as its predecessor, and thus we in the West tend to see that as our cultural lineage. Cherry picked of course, not wholesale, as we tend to with more immediate own history too (Dutch Golden Age and the role of slave trade and colonial extraction e.g. unacknowledged but being a safe haven for religious refugees from elsewhere in Europe such as the Sefardim or Hugenots clearly embraced)

This is the logical consequence, but most don't get that far. Most just stop at, "homeland for the Jewish people" - a kind of historical, cultural Zionism of the "next year in Jerusalem" aspirational variety.

for: imitation - child - mother, social learning, cultural learning - origin, altricial, mother - child relation

What comes out of alternately reading theological books with understanding and compassion and then switching to raw logic?

One can query the text in closed-captioning from the Internet Archive to track trends, and particularly politics, on television news.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva

• for: cultural evolution, cultural evolution - Bruce Hood, cumulative cultural evolution, CCE, gene-culture coevolution

• paraphrase

  • Our evolving technology allowed us to expand into new territories and manipulate the environment in ways that gave us an edge.
  • Places like this remind me about how harsh nature can be.
  • We're so used to living in air conditioning, and having the comfort of the modern world, but when you go out into nature and experience it first hand, you're reminded very powerfully about how weak we are as an animal.
  • And this is because we are fundamentally a cultural species.
  • Culture is our life support system.
  • Our cumulative culture allows us to
    • cushion ourselves against the harsh realities of the environment and to
    • reshape the environment.

• for: cultural evolution, cumulative cultural evolution, CCE, bioengineering, novel life form, culturally evolved life, bioethics, progress trap, progress trap - bioengineering, progress trap - genetic engineering
• comment
  • cultural evolution, which itself emerges from biological evolution is acting upon itself to create new life forms that have no evolutionary backstory
  • this is tantamount to playing God
  • progress traps often emerge out of the large speed mismatch between cultural and biological/genetic evolution.
  • Nowhere is this more profound than in bioengineering of new forms of life with no evolutionary history
  • This presents profound ethical challenges

Some may not realize it yet, but the shift in technology represented by ChatGPT is just another small evolution in the chain of predictive text with the realms of information theory and corpus linguistics.

Claude Shannon's work along with Warren Weaver's introduction in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), shows some of the predictive structure of written communication. This is potentially better underlined for the non-mathematician in John R. Pierce's book An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961) in which discusses how one can do a basic analysis of written English to discover that "e" is the most prolific letter or to predict which letters are more likely to come after other letters. The mathematical structures have interesting consequences like the fact that crossword puzzles are only possible because of the repetitive nature of the English language or that one can use the editor's notation "TK" (usually meaning facts or date To Come) in writing their papers to make it easy to find missing information prior to publication because the statistical existence of the letter combination T followed by K is exceptionally rare and the only appearances of it in long documents are almost assuredly areas which need to be double checked for data or accuracy.

Cell phone manufacturers took advantage of the lower levels of this mathematical predictability to create T9 predictive text in early mobile phone technology. This functionality is still used in current cell phones to help speed up our texting abilities. The difference between then and now is that almost everyone takes the predictive magic for granted.

As anyone with "fat fingers" can attest, your phone doesn't always type out exactly what you mean which can result in autocorrect mistakes (see: DYAC (Damn You AutoCorrect)) of varying levels of frustration or hilarity. This means that when texting, one needs to carefully double check their work before sending their text or social media posts or risk sending their messages to Grand Master Flash instead of Grandma.

The evolution in technology effected by larger amounts of storage, faster processing speeds, and more text to study means that we've gone beyond the level of predicting a single word or two ahead of what you intend to text, but now we're predicting whole sentences and even paragraphs which make sense within a context. ChatGPT means that one can generate whole sections of text which will likely make some sense.

Sadly, as we know from our T9 experience, this massive jump in predictability doesn't mean that ChatGPT or other predictive artificial intelligence tools are "magically" correct! In fact, quite often they're wrong or will predict nonsense, a phenomenon known as AI hallucination. Just as with T9, we need to take even more time and effort to not only spell check the outputs from the machine, but now we may need to check for the appropriateness of style as well as factual substance!

The bigger near-term problem is one of human understanding and human communication. While the machine may appear to magically communicate (often on our behalf if we're publishing it's words under our names), is it relaying actual meaning? Is the other person reading these words understanding what was meant to have been communicated? Do the words create knowledge? Insight?

We need to recall that Claude Shannon specifically carved semantics and meaning out of the picture in the second paragraph of his seminal paper:

Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

So far ChatGPT seems to be accomplishing magic by solving a small part of an engineering problem by being able to explore the adjacent possible. It is far from solving the human semantic problem much less the un-adjacent possibilities (potentially representing wisdom or insight), and we need to take care to be aware of that portion of the unsolved problem. Generative AIs are also just choosing weighted probabilities and spitting out something which is prone to seem possible, but they're not optimizing for which of many potential probabilities is the "best" or the "correct" one. For that, we still need our humanity and faculties for decision making.

Shannon, Claude E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 1948.

Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, 1949.

Pierce, John Robinson. An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. Second, Revised. Dover Books on Mathematics. 1961. Reprint, Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, Inc., 1980. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Theory-Symbols-Mathematics/dp/0486240614.

Shannon, Claude Elwood. “The Bandwagon.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2, no. 1 (March 1956): 3. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.

We may also need to explore The Bandwagon, an early effect which Shannon noticed and commented upon. Everyone seems to be piling on the AI bandwagon right now...

Karl Lamprecht was one of Warburg's first teachers in Bonn and Warburg had a section in his zettelkasten dedicated to him. While Warburg wasn't part of the broader public debate on Lamprecht's Methodenstreit (methodological dispute), his notes indicate that he took an active stance on thinking about it.

Consult footnote for more:

59 Vgl. Roger Chickering, »The Lamprecht Controversy«, in: Historiker- kontroversen, hrsg. von Hartmut Lehmann, Göttingen 20 0 0, S. 15 – 29

This is one of the things that doesn't seem to be being explored enough presently, or at least I'm not seeing it outside of the SAG and WGA strikes where it seems to be a side issue rather than a primary issue.

Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

It can be easy to deprive a generation of important pieces of their cultural heritage by omitting any focus on it.

• shiboleth
• philology
• disinterest
• overwhelm

Compare the loss of classical education and cultural heritage by "internal decay" as described by Hutchins in the early 1900s and the forced loss of cultural heritage of Indigenous Americans by the U.S. Government in roughly the same period by re-education and stamping out Indigenous language.

Certainly one was loss through lack of exposure, but the other was outright erasure due to the natures of orality and literacy.

• for: progress trap, cumulative cultural evolution, gene-culture co-evolution, speed of cultural evolution, human genome project
• paraphrase
  • the human genome project took 10 years and cost 3 billion dollars
  • with NGS technology, 10 years later, the same job takes 1 day and costs $15,000 dollars

• for: climate change - evolutionary causes, cultural evolution - unsustainability, unsustainability
• definition: Anthroecological theory (AET)
  • This theory proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering

• for: for: ecological collapse, overshoot, progress trap, progress trap - cultural evolution, ultra-sociality, Lotka's maximum power, gene culture coevolution
• key finding
  • paraphrase
    • In AET,
      • multi-level selection acting on the genome and
      • occurring in concert with selective and non-selective mechanisms acting on culture and technology
    • results in a species that is prone to
      • niche construction and
      • ecosystem engineering,
    • and the scale of these processes continues to increase as the population rises.
    • This increasing scale
      • coupled with human propensity for niche construction
    • leads to human unsustainability

• for: ecological collapse, overshoot, progress trap, progress trap - cultural evolution, ultra-sociality, Lotka's maximum power
• paraphrase
  • to Gowdy and Krall, the ultra-social nature of human groups allowed for a shift in the primary level of selection
    • from the individual level
    • to the group level.
  • Thus, “With the transition to agriculture the group as an adaptive unit comes to constitute a wholly different gestalt
    • driven by the imperative to produce surplus

• for: AET, Anthroecological theory, anthropocene - causes, ecological crisis - roots, overshoot
• paraphrase
  • Anthroecological theory (AET) hypothesizes that
    • human social and cultural evolution is the ultimate cause of the ecological crises currently damaging earth systems

• for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap

• Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability

• Author: Brian F. Snyder

• Abstract

• Summary
• Paraphrase
  • Anthropogenic changes are accelerating and threaten the future of life on earth.
  • While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied
    • climate change,
    • biodiversity loss,
    • population growth
  • the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.
  • Anthroecological theory (AET) proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is
    • multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering.
  • Here, we integrate this theory with
    • Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle
  • and propose a model linking
    • energy extraction from the environment with
    • genetic, technological and cultural evolution
  • to increase human ecosystem carrying capacity.
  • Carrying capacity is partially determined by energetic factors such as
    • the net energy a population can acquire from its environment and
    • the efficiency of conversion from energy input to offspring output.
  • These factors are under Darwinian genetic selection
  • in all species,
  • but in humans, they are also determined by
    • technology and
    • culture.
  • If there is genetic or non-genetic heritable variation in
    • the ability of an individual or social group
  • to increase its carrying capacity,
  • then we hypothesize that - selection or cultural evolution will act - to increase carrying capacity.
  • Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs - faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution,
    • then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.

• for: futures, decarbonizing - cultural sector, climate futures - cultural sector, climate futures - cultural industry
• paraphrase
  • more local performances
  • more local purchases
  • leverage point for regional transition
  • reduce capacity
  • slowdown
  • reconceive / eco-conceive the arts so that it may endure
  • educate and change public policy

• for carbon inequality, carbon emissions - air travel, carbon emissions - concerts, stats - air travel - concerts
• paraphrase
• stats
  • The Shift Project has estimated that
    • if only 3% of festival-goers attending the Vieilles Charrues Festival come by plane, they account for more than 60% of carbon emissions linked to public transport!
  • Tomorrowland concert - close to 25,000 festival-goers fly in via "party flights"
  • North America Burning Man - 20% of festival goers fly in
  • In general, the largest footprint for famous cultural events is air travel

• for: carbon emissions of the 1%, carbon inequality, carbon emissions - artists, high carbon lifestyle
• comment
  • top tier entertainers are conditioned to a high carbon lifestyle. This is a challenge to overcome.
  • example given
    • DJ who flew to perform in four different EU cities in the same evening!

• for: carbon emissions - culture, carbon emissions - cultural sector, carbon footprint - culture,

• paraphrase

• stats
  • for France
  • culture and leisure are the third reason for travel after work and shopping
  • watching movies at movie theatre alone is responsible for nearly one million tons of CO2 emissions
  • culture takes up 60% of all downloads on the internet, 80% if porn is included
  • tens of thousands of buildings such as auditoriums are depending on fossil fuels to operate
  • cultural events drive high carbon tourist industry:
    • account for 60% of revenue of hotels and restaurants at the Avignon Festival
    • Louvre's carbon footprint of 3.4 million tons of CO2 emissions are in large part due to air travel of tourists from around the globe

• for: emissions reduction, bend the curve, TPF, W2W, emissions reduction - cultural sector, bend the curve - cultural sector, TPF - cultural sector, W2W - cultural sector, carbon emissions - cultural sector, carbon inequality

• comment

  • well written article on the carbon emissions challenges of the cultural sector
  • this is related to the carbon emissions of the luxury industry as well
• question
  • same question as asked about luxury, since there is overlap with culture industry and luxury
  • Given that the 1% have the same carbon emissions as the bottom half of humanity, does the sustainability impacts of the decarbonization efforts of the luxury aspects of the culture industry measure up to stay under earth system boundaries in time?
• reference
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=carbon+inequality

• for: carbon emissions - DJ, carbon footprint - DJ, carbon emissions - music industry, carbon emission - cultural sector, research study - carbon emissions - DJ
• noteworthy
  • some DJ's fly to perform in four European cities in a single evening!

• for cultural evolution, speed of cultural evolution, cumulative cultural evolution, progress trap, Freeman Dyson,
• comment
  • Freeman Dyson opines that cultural evolution of humans now determines the genetic fate of all species on the planet
    • and gives a warning of how human cumulative cultural evolution now has the potential to threaten, via genetic sciences to play God over biology itself -reference
  • Musician Yoyo Ma quotes Freeman:
  • https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F2fBmGXqHvk8%2F&group=world

• for: cultural evolution, cumulative cultural evolution, speed of cultural evolution, progress trap, Freeman Dyson, Anthropocene
• comment
  • while Freeman spoke to the direct dangers of genetic engineering,
    • he neglected to point out the broader threat of progress itself, which has already placed our species in the position
      • of playing God with the evolution of many species on the planet already, via the enormous impacts of organized human activity - ie. the Anthropocene

• for: cumulative cultural evolution, speed of cultural evolution
• paraphrase
  • The story that they are telling
  • is of a grand transition that occurred about fifty thousand years ago,
  • when the driving force of evolution changed
    • from biology
    • to culture,
  • and the direction changed
    • from diversification
    • to unification of species.
  • The understanding of this story can perhaps help us to deal more wisely with our responsibilities as stewards of our planet.

• for: human impacts, MET, major evolutionary transition, progress trap, human responsibility to life, CCE, cumulative cultural evolution, playing God
• comment
  • Very true, in fact our species is in the unprecedented position that
  • human activity, and specifically our cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) now determines the biological / genetic evolutionary future not only of our own species, but of all life on earth.
  • In other words, of evolution itself! -This is an awkward position as we have nowhere near the wisdom to play God and determine the future direction of evolution!
• References
  • Cumulative Cultural Evolution
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=cumulative%2Bcultural%2Bevolution

• for: climate communication, mass mobilization, collective action, climate messaging, beauty, evolution
• claim
  • the natural world is sexy, beautiful, and it would be a waste to have it all destroyed
  • the entire biosphere is made out of female desire for no reason to it
    • not with an objective of reproducing
      • but just with an objective of wow that's really sexy I like it
    • and that's a very very good reason isn't it to to save the planet
  • these beautiful qualities that have no Rhyme or Reason to them but are actually to do with creativity and Imagination
    • are not some kind of special thing that human beings impose from some kind of abstract Heaven onto Earth
    • they are actually heaven on Earth
    • they're part of Heaven and they are coming out of our embodied biological being right and this is an amazing thing
      • pity and
      • compassion and
      • generosity
    • and all these things are are traits in primates
      • sharing things and
      • being kind right
    • and so I reckon you know the kind of religious feeling that we need to inculcate
    • it is actually about this feeling inside
      • this kind of surging feeling of
        • inspiration and
        • love and
        • passion
      • and everything is exactly coming to us from our Evolution and
      • it's coming for no reason at all
      • it's just coming from random genetic mutation and the fact that having these feelings doesn't kill you
    • so this is a very good reason I think to save Earth
    • the essence of us is
      • our future and
      • our physical biological being
    • and it's always just a little bit off to the side like tomorrow is just a little bit off to the side of today
      • but I'm going to get there at some point right and
      • I think that's the attitude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1_RKu-ESCY

Lots of controversy over this music video this past week or so.

In addition to some of the double entendre meanings of "we take care of our own", I'm most appalled about the tacit support of the mythology that small towns are "good" and large cities are "bad" (or otherwise scary, crime-ridden, or dangerous).

What are the crime statistics per capita about the safety of small versus large?

Availability bias of violence and crime in the big cities are overly sampled by most media (newspapers, radio, and television). This video plays heavily into this bias.

There's also an opposing availability bias going on with respect to the positive aspects of small communities "taking care of their own" when in general, from an institutional perspective small towns are patently not taking care of each other or when they do its very selective and/or in-crowd based rather than across the board.

Note also that all the news clips and chyrons are from Fox News in this piece.

Alternately where are the musicians singing about and focusing on the positive aspects of cities and their cultures.

Gallagher, John. Review of As the Priest Said to the Nun, by Carla Roth. London Review of Books, June 1, 2023. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n11/john-gallagher/as-the-priest-said-to-the-nun.

The level of orality in societies can radically change our perceptions of their histories, though quite often this material is missing in our evaluations.

• comment
  • example of
    • Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE)

• quote

  • "it is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all the business of evolution appointed without being asked if he wanted it and without proper warning and preparation what is more he can't refuse the job whether he wants to or not whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth that is his inescapable Destiny and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it the better for all concerns"
  • Julian Huxley

• Comment

  • Huxley was prescient in making this observation,
    • as our species
      • cumulative cultural evolution, and
      • the impact of our niche construction
      • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&tag=cumulative+cultural+evolution
    • does now indeed more or less determine the entire course of evolution of life on earth

Is there potentially a worry amongst Republicans that by losing the "culture wars" that they'll somehow lose control of society and the capitalist order which funds their party and helps to keep them in control?

Link to Gramsci's idea about cultural hegemony: https://hypothes.is/a/pRnPLPTtEe2_pyt2-Z7pwg

Bei einer Vollversammlung des permanenten Forums der UN für indigene Angelegenheiten warnten Vertreter indigener Völker nachdrücklich vor einer Dekarbonisierung auf ihre Kosten, etwa durch Bergbau. Auch Artenschutz wird angeführt um indigene zu vertreiben, wie bei einem von den Vereinigten Arabischen Vereinigten Emiraten vorangetrieben Wildreservat im Massai-Gebiet. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/23/un-indigenous-peoples-forum-climate-strategy-warning

I just watched the documentary Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory (Wechsler, 2016) via Kanopy (for free using my local library's gateway) and thought that others here interested in the ideas of memory in culture, history, and art history may appreciate it. While a broad biography of a seminal figure in the development of art history in the early 20th century, there are some interesting bits relating to art and memory as well as a mention of Frances A. Yates whose research on memory was influenced by Warburg's library.

Also of "note" is the fact that Aby Warburg had a significant zettelkasten-based note taking practice and portions of his collection (both written as well as images) are featured within the hour long documentary.

Researchers interested in images, art, dance, and gesture as they relate to memory may appreciate this short film as an entrance into some of Aby Warburg's more specialized research which includes some cultural anthropology research into American Hopi indigenous peoples. cc: @LynneKelly

syndication link

// - To find a God that can kill Moloch - requires an understanding of the nature of progress as well - Relationship to progress traps - Exponential technologies - are technologies, and all suffer the same fundamental flaw - Progress is an expression of our cumulative cultural evolution - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=cumulative+cultural+evolution - which grows exponentially faster than genetic evolution - The problem of which is that - the shadow side of progress, the progress trap - - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=progress%2Btrap - is growing even faster, due to our misunderstanding of it, - allowing it to fester like an untreated wound - turning a minor condition, into a life-threatening disease - Human progress has always been a bungling two step forwards, one step backwards dance - the imperfections of progress are inherent - and baked into the innovation process itself - For we develop technologies based on what we know, or what is visible - but what we know is like the tip of the latent knowledge iceberg - and is always accompanied by a much larger hidden component of what we don't know - In other words, - finite and visible knowledge - is always accompanied by infinite and invisible ignorance - Design is based on intent, - a one dimensional, inherently myopic imagination - of a multi-dimensional reality - A problem is a one dimensional focus - on a small sliver of reality - A solution to the problem is necessarily - myopic and - one dimensional as well - Both problems and their (designed) solutions - are extreme simplifications of a complex system - Language itself is a way - to direct and focus our attention - to this aspect of reality - then that aspect - Thinking is reduced to parts, and never experiences the whole, undivided gestalt of reality - Out of this process - Progress traps are born //

las bibliotecas publicas son escenarios de aprendizaje donde se enriquecen los conocimientos

Definition - Cumulative Cultural Evolution - The core criteria follow the definition of CCE provided in Tomasello's quotation above - A population exhibits CCE iff - (i) a change in behaviour (or product of behaviour, such as an artefact), typically due to asocial learning, followed by - (ii) the transfer via social learning of that novel or modified behaviour to other individuals or groups, where - (iii) the learned behaviour causes an improvement in performance, - which is a proxy of genetic and/or cultural fitness, with - (iv) the previous three steps repeated in a manner that generates sequential improvement over time.

• Boyd & Richerson give a nice explanation of CCE
• In contrast [to non-human species' cultural traditions],
  • human cultures do accumulate changes over many generations,
  • resulting in culturally transmitted behaviors that no single human individual could invent on their own.

Title: What is cumulative cultural evolution (CCE)?

Authors: - Alex Mesoudi - Alex Thornton

Abstract - In recent years, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has become the focus of major research interest in - biology, - psychology and - anthropology. - There is a range of opinions on CCE - some argue that CCE is unique to humans - and underlies our extraordinary evolutionary success as a species. - Others claim to have found CCE in non-human species. - Yet others remain sceptical that CCE is even important for explaining - human behavioural diversity and - complexity. - These debates are hampered by multiple and often ambiguous definitions of CCE. - Here, we review how researchers define, use and test CCE. - We identify a core set of criteria for CCE - which are both necessary and sufficient, and - may be found in non-human species. - We also identify a set of extended criteria - that are observed in human CCE - but not, to date, in other species. - Different socio-cognitive mechanisms may underlie these different criteria. - We reinterpret - previous theoretical models and - observational and - experimental studies of both - human and - non-human species - in light of these more fine-grained criteria. - Finally, we discuss key issues surrounding information, fitness and cognition. - We recommend that researchers are more explicit about what components of CCE they are testing and claiming to demonstrate.

Title: Fox News producer files explosive lawsuits against the network, alleging she was coerced into providing misleading Dominion testimony

// - This is an example of how big media corporations can deceive the public and compromise the truth - It helps create a nation of misinformed people which destabilizes political governance - the workspace sounds toxic - the undertone of this story: the pathological transformation of media brought about by capitalism - it is the need for ratings, which is the indicator for profit in the marketing world, that has corrupted the responsibility to report truthfully - making money becomes the consumerist dream at the expense of all else of intrinsic value within a culture - knowledge is what enables culture to exist, modernity is based on cumulative cultural evolution - this is an example of NON-conscious cumulative cultural evolution or pathological cumulaitve cultural evolution

It has been suggested that - the human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI).

there is disagreement about - how to apply the ETI framework to our species - and whether culture is implicated - as either cause or consequence.

Long-term gene–culture coevolution (GCC) i- s - also poorly understood.

argued that - culture steers human evolution,

Others proposed - genes hold culture on a leash.

After review of the literature and evidence on long-term GCC in humans - emerge a set of common themes. - First, culture appears to hold greater adaptive potential than genetic inheritance - and is probably driving human evolution. - The evolutionary impact of culture occurs - mainly through culturally organized groups, - which have come to dominate human affairs in recent millennia. - Second, the role of culture appears to be growing, - increasingly bypassing genetic evolution and weakening genetic adaptive potential. -Taken together, these findings suggest that human long-term GCC is characterized by - an evolutionary transition in inheritance - from genes to culture - which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group). Research on GCC should focus on the possibility of - an ongoing transition in the human inheritance system.

• Quote
  • In the very long term, we suggest that humans are evolving from individual genetic organisms to cultural groups which function as superorganisms, similar to ant colonies and beehives,
  • Tim Waring

• key observation
  • human culture may represent a key evolutionary milestone
  • culture may be the next evolutionary transition state
    • pre-single self organisms like mitochondria increased fitness by sharing the environment with other life forms and formed the single cell
    • then multi-cellular organisms set the stage for the next big evolutionary paradigm
    • splitting into plants and animals
    • sexual reproduction
    • transition to land
  • we are possibly undergoing the next major evolutionary transition
  • in which we will still evolve genetically,
  • but genetics may not determine human survival as much as culture does

• key observation
• paraphrase

• why cultural evolution is too fast for genetic evolution

  • Culture is group-oriented, and people in those groups talk to, learn from and imitate one another.
  • These group behaviors allow people to pass on adaptations they learned through culture faster than genes can transmit similar survival benefits.
  • An individual can learn skills and information from a nearly unlimited number of people in a small amount of time
    • and, in turn, spread that information to many others.
  • And the more people available to learn from, the better.
  • Large groups solve problems faster than smaller groups,
  • and intergroup competition stimulates adaptations that might help those groups survive.

  • As ideas spread, cultures develop new traits.

  • In contrast, a person only inherits genetic information from two parents

    • and racks up relatively few random mutations in their eggs or sperm, which takes about 20 years to be passed on to their small handful of children.
  • That's just a much slower pace of change.

!- key finding - human culture may be driving evolution faster than genetic mutation can work - the major delay, measured in many orders of magnitude - does not allow genetic evolution to adapt quickly enough - to harmful environmental changes brought about through cultural evolution

• TItle: Humans might be making genetic evolution obsolete

// In Other Words

• we must undo the myopic cultural evolution that has already taken place with a more collectively conscious form of cultural evolution //

• Title: Gene–culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality
• Author: Herbert Gintis

//Abstract - Summary - Human characteristics are the product of gene–culture coevolution, - which is an evolutionary dynamic involving the interaction of genes and culture - over long time periods. - Gene–culture coevolution is a special case of niche construction. - Gene–culture coevolution is responsible for: - human other-regarding preferences, - a taste for fairness, - the capacity to empathize and - salience of morality and character virtues.

• Title: Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus
• Author:
  • Jeremy Kendal
  • Jamshid J. Tehrani
  • John Oding-Smee
• Abstract
  • summary
  • Niche construction is an endogenous causal process in evolution,
• reciprocal to the causal process of natural selection.
  • It works by adding ecological inheritance,
  • comprising the inheritance of natural selection pressures previously modified by niche construction,
  • to genetic inheritance in evolution.
  • Human niche construction modifies selection pressures in environments in ways that affect both human evolution, and the evolution of other species.
  • Human ecological inheritance is exceptionally potent
  • because it includes the social transmission and inheritance
  • of cultural knowledge, and material culture.
  • Human genetic inheritance
  • in combination with human cultural inheritance
  • thus provides a basis for gene–culture coevolution,
  • and multivariate dynamics in cultural evolution.
  • Niche construction theory potentially integrates the biological and social aspects of the human sciences.
  • We elaborate on these processes,
  • and provide brief introductions to each of the papers published in this theme issue.