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Results for “Cultural Evolution”

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At least 307 records · Page 17Linked to original sources
PubMed1995

Effects of nicotinamide on hepatocyte viability and secretion of albumin and alpha 1-acid glycoprotein by adult rat hepatocytes in primoculture. Comparison with dexamethasone and recombinant human interleukin-6.

The effects of nicotinamide on hepatocyte viability and secretion of albumin and alpha 1-acid glycoprotein were studied in the absence or presence of dexamethasone and/or recombinant human interleukin-6 either after cell attachment (2 h) or after 24, 48, and 72 h of culture. The evolution of hepatocyte survival during the culture was appreciated by measurement of total DNA content. The secretion of albumin and alpha 1-acid glycoprotein was measured after a 4-h period following cell attachment or after 24, 48 and 72 h of culture. The important decrease of DNA content, mRNA levels and secretion of albumin and alpha 1-acid glycoprotein in control cultures after 2-3 days was not prevented by the addition of nicotinamide. In contrast, dexamethasone alone or with recombinant human interleukin-6 improved DNA content and albumin secretion with no additional effect of nicotinamide. The secretion of alpha 1-acid glycoprotein was largely induced by dexamethasone alone or dexamethasone and recombinant human interleukin-6. The increase of alpha 1-acid glycoprotein secretion was not modified by the addition of nicotinamide and averaged respectively 27- and 60-fold for dexamethasone alone and dexamethasone and recombinant human interleukin-6 after 48 h. These observations suggested that nicotinamide, at least in the conditions tested here, is unable to prevent alterations of hepatocyte viability and gene expression of cultured hepatocytes.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

The cumulative advance of human know-how.

Modern humans possess an enormous amount of 'know-how' that enables them to do things that early humans could not dream of doing. This paper explores some promising connections between two bodies of empirical research and theorizing that bear on technological know-how and its advance. Cognitive science is concerned with the nature and mechanisms of human knowing. The focus traditionally has not been on the knowledge involved in complex technologies, nor on the processes through which human know-how has advanced over time. However, certain recent developments in this field provide a nice linkage with the implicit cognitive theorizing used by scholars who study the advance of technology. And a number of the debates in the two fields are similar.

Biological Evolution↗
PubMed2004

Evolutionary model with genetics, aging, and knowledge.

We represent a process of learning by using bit strings, where 1 bits represent the knowledge acquired by individuals. Two ways of learning are considered: individual learning by trial and error, and social learning by copying knowledge from other individuals or from parents in the case of species with parental care. The age-structured bit string allows us to study how knowledge is accumulated during life and its influence over the genetic pool of a population after many generations. We use the Penna model to represent the genetic inheritance of each individual. In order to study how the accumulated knowledge influences the survival process, we include it to help individuals to avoid the various death situations. Modifications in the Verhulst factor do not show any special feature due to its random nature. However, by adding years to life as a function of the accumulated knowledge, we observe an improvement of the survival rates while the genetic fitness of the population becomes worse. In this latter case, knowledge becomes more important in the last years of life where individuals are threatened by diseases. Effects of offspring overprotection and differences between individual and social learning can also be observed. Sexual selection as a function of knowledge shows some effects when fidelity is imposed.

Aging↗
PubMed2004

The evolutionary origin of cooperators and defectors.

Coexistence of cooperators and defectors is common in nature, yet the evolutionary origin of such social diversification is unclear. Many models have been studied on the basis of the assumption that benefits of cooperative acts only accrue to others. Here, we analyze the continuous snowdrift game, in which cooperative investments are costly but yield benefits to others as well as to the cooperator. Adaptive dynamics of investment levels often result in evolutionary diversification from initially uniform populations to a stable state in which cooperators making large investments coexist with defectors who invest very little. Thus, when individuals benefit from their own actions, large asymmetries in cooperative investments can evolve.

Altruism↗
PubMed2004

The evolution of semantic systems.

Semantic or cultural systems are sets of concepts connected by meaningful relationships, and they exhibit properties similar to those of populations of biological organisms. Drawing upon ideas from evolutionary biology and methods from information technology, this article explores the potential for research and engineering on the evolution of semantic systems. Such work in cultural genetics requires two things: (1) a rigorous but evolving taxonomic system to categorize cultural artifacts, elements, and clusters, and (2) a set of hypotheses about the processes that cause evolutionary change. This article illustrates systematic approaches to cultural taxonomy with data on the popular ideology of the space program, science fiction motion pictures, nanotechnology books, and nanotechnology research grants. It offers hypotheses derived from evolutionary and population biology that might be useful in explaining cultural evolution.

Biological Evolution↗
PubMed2005

Planet of the apes.

What makes us humans so special? Our language, our genes, our culture, our cognitive skills? At the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, psychologists, linguists and biologists tackle this old question in a truly multidisciplinary way. Their results have implications not just for our understanding of human evolution--they also touch directly on many social and environmental issues. Florian Maderspacher reports.

Academies and Institutes↗
PubMed2004

The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity.

The existence and diversity of human cultures are made possible by our species-specific cognitive capacities. But how? Do cultures emerge and diverge as a result of the deployment, over generations and in different populations, of general abilities to learn, imitate and communicate? What role if any do domain-specific evolved cognitive abilities play in the emergence and evolution of cultures? These questions have been approached from different vantage points in different disciplines. Here we present a view that is currently developing out of the converging work of developmental psychologists, evolutionary psychologists and cognitive anthropologists.

Cognition↗
PubMed2003

The biological basis of human history.

Well-known physiological peculiarities of human bodies had much to do with raising our ancestors to the top of the food chain: erect posture, binocular vision, an unusually efficient cooling system, and an omnivorous diet. But these capabilities pale beside the advantages that accrued to proto-humans and then to humans from expanding and more precise modes of communication: first dance, then language. Still later, transportation and communication transcended limits set by human muscles with the invention of wind-propelled flotation and animal caravans, while writing overcame limits of personal memory and face-to-face dissemination of information. Contacts across local social and cultural boundaries tended to propagate best practices, making humankind a uniquely dangerous, constantly changing parasite upon other forms of life.

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMed1999

Clinical and laboratory evolution of a culture-confirmed case of human granulocytic ehrlichiosis.

A 74-year-old man from suburban New York City, who was hospitalized because of chest pain and fever, was diagnosed as having human granulocytic ehrlichiosis on the eighth hospital day. Although leukocyte and platelet counts were normal on admission, they fell to abnormally low values then normalized prior to specific therapy against the human granulocytic ehrlichiosis agent. Intracytoplasmic inclusions suggestive of Ehrlichia were observed in up to six percent of granulocytes, and the human granulocytic ehrlichiosis bacterium was cultured in an HL 60 human promyelocytic cell line. The patient improved dramatically within 24 hours of doxycycline treatment, after failing to improve on various beta lactam antimicrobial agents. He was discharged from the hospital 14 days after admission. Because human granulocytic ehrlichiosis was not diagnosed until his eight hospital day, clinical and laboratory parameters prior to specific treatment were available. This case illustrates the clinical and laboratory evolution of the infection with human granulocytic ehrlichiosis agent in humans.

Aged↗
PubMed1995

Psychoanalysis and the science of evolution.

An effort has been made to develop a critical overview of current advances in the psychoanalytic explorations of culture and evolution. The paper delineates some of the basic propositions of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, especially those that are pertinent to psychoanalytic investigations. It then attempts to critically evaluate the psychoanalytic literature that has been developed on the basis of these propositions. While acknowledging that these are bold and inventive ventures into new domains that in time are likely to greatly expand and enhance psychoanalytic thinking, the paper discusses some major problems with the methodology and thinking that characterizes this work. Among these troublesome concerns is the tendency of these analytic investigators to rely too heavily on animal data for their thinking about the human psyche and its interactions. There is as well a related failure to deeply appreciate the emergent properties of the human mind. It is suggested that this work needs to be grounded in a clear set of basic units of mental structure and functioning lest the adaptationist programs and theoretical ideas that are developed be badly flawed. Because this work has such great potential, it is hoped that the issues and matters for debate raised in the present paper will lead to fruitful discussion and to a more solid foundation for these imaginative pursuits.

Altruism↗
PubMed2004

The evolution of vocabulary.

Human language is unique among the communication systems of the natural world. The vocabulary of human language is unique in being both culturally transmitted and symbolic. In this paper I present an investigation into the factors involved in the evolution of such vocabulary systems. I investigate both the cultural evolution of vocabulary systems and the biological evolution of learning rules for vocabulary acquisition. Firstly, vocabularies are shown to evolve on a cultural time-scale so as to fit the expectations of learners-a population's vocabulary adapts to the biases of the learners in that population. A learning bias in favour of one-to-one mappings between meanings and words leads to the cultural evolution of communicatively optimal vocabulary systems, even in the absence of any explicit pressure for communication. Furthermore, the pressure to conform to the biases of learners is shown to outweigh natural selection acting on cultural transmission. Human language learners appear to bring a one-to-one bias to the acquisition of vocabulary systems. The functionality of human vocabulary may therefore be a consequence of the biases of human language learners. Secondly, the evolutionary stability of genetically transmitted vocabulary learning biases is investigated using both static and dynamic models. A one-to-one learning bias, which leads to the cultural evolution of optimal communication, is shown to be evolutionarily stable. However, the evolution de novo of this bias is complicated by the cumulative nature of the cultural evolution of vocabulary systems. This suggests that the biases of human language learners may not have evolved specifically and exclusively for the acquisition of communicatively functional vocabulary.

Cultural Evolution↗