Cumulative Cultural Evolution

| Not Exactly Rocket Scienceopen original article Thu Mar 1, 2012 19:00 from Discover Master Feed We are like dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. This metaphor, famously used by Isaac Newton, describes how humans build on what has come before. Everything in our culture is the result of knowledge and skills that have slowly accumulated over time. Without this “cumulative culture”, we wouldn’t have our deep scientific knowledge, rich artistic traditions, or sophisticated technology. Simply put, you can’t make a car from scratch – first, you need to invent the wheel. Are we alone in this respect? Certainly, many other animals can learn knowledge and skills from each other, and many of them have cultural traditions. But Newton’s metaphor involves not just the spread of knowledge, but its gradual improvement. We build on the past, rather than just passing it along. As generations tick by, our culture becomes more complex. Do other species show the same ‘cultural ratchet’? Lewis Dean from the University of St Andrews tried to answer that question by presenting human children, chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys with the same task: a puzzle box with three, increasingly difficult stages, each one building on the last. If you slide a door on the box, you reveal a tube with a carrot – nutritious enough for a chimp or monkey, but low on the list of preferred foods. If you push two buttons, you can slide the door further to reveal an apple – a more desirable snack. Finally, you can twist a dial to slide the door ever further to unveil a grape – the ultimate in taste treats. (For children, the tubes contained increasingly attractive stickers.) All three species tackled the puzzle box in groups, and because there were two sets of doors, rewards, buttons and dials, two individuals could work at the puzzle simultaneously. Dean found that fewer than 10 per cent of the chimps managed to find the apple after 30 hours, and only one of them got the grape. The capuchins did even worse – after 53 hours, just 5 per cent got the apple, and none of them found the grape. Even when Dean partnered the chimps with a veteran animal that had been trained to solve all three levels, they didn’t benefit. The children had no such problems. After less than three hours, just over half of them had managed stage 2, and just under half had solved stage 3. Dean thinks that the children succeeded where the other animals failed because of several social traits, including their tendency to teach, imitate, share with, and talk to each other. All of these traits are found in other animals, but to a lesser extent. That difference of degree came through in the puzzle-box experiment. The children taught each other something about the puzzle box on 23 occasions (“Push that button”). They spoke to each other regularly. They were the only species to imitate each other more often than not. And they spontaneously gave the stickers they earned to their peers on 215 occasions. And the more they learned, spoke, imitated, and shared, the better they did with the puzzle box. In stark contrast, the chimps and capuchins never taught each other. How could Dean tell? Well, none of them explicitly referenced a part of the box to their peers. They rarely called to each other and when they did, they didn’t even attract their peers to the box, let alone help them to solve it. They tried their own thing more often than imitating each other. When the chimps aped their peers, they only ever did so in the first stage of the puzzle. And never once did they hand over the food that they had earned. Other scientists have put forward other explanations for cumulative culture in humans that have nothing to do with our social side. For example, some have suggested that other animals steal from each other more often, adhere to stricter pecking orders, or behave more conservatively. All of these traits could prevent them from gradually building their knowledge. But Dean found no evidence in his study to support any of these ideas. To him, the children succeeded because they saw the box as a social exercise, working together to solve it. It was the means that mattered to them, not the ends. The other species failed because they saw the box as a way to get food for themselves, independently of their peers. Dean says that cumulative culture depends on “a package of social cognitive capabilities” that are either “absent or impoverished in chimpanzees and capuchins”. Other scientists have looked for evidence of cumulative culture in chimps and failed to find it. But this is the first study to compare how three different species deal with the same task. Victoria Horner from Emory University, who studies the mental abilities of different species, was impressed by Dean’s study. But she points out that the children worked for stickers, while the others worked for food. “Chimps are naturally competitive over food. If they had received stickers or food tokens, would they behave the same way or be more tolerant like the children?” she wonders. “In contrast, if the children were working for candy, would they be so easy-going?” Horner also says that the study doesn’t mean that chimps and capuchins don’t have cumulative cultures. Chimps certainly have the right elements in place. “They are able to imitate and behave prosocially, and there is suggestive evidence for teaching in nut-cracking,” says Horner. It just takes them longer to invent a new behaviour, and more goes to demonstrate that behaviour to others. She adds, “If cumulative culture does exist in other species, it is extremely rare. Humans are much better at [it] but I don’t think the data support the conclusion that cumulative culture is totally absent in chimpanzees.” Reference: Dean, Kendal, Schapiro, Thierry & Laland. 2012. Identification of the Social and Cognitive Processes Underlying Human Cumulative Culture. Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1213969

The Real and Exists

Real things are phenomena that either have mass, or are subject to the laws of cause and effect, or in some way interact with other things.

This is not sufficient to make them exist. To make a thing exist, it must emerge into the awareness of a conscious being.

So most of the unobservable universe is real but does not currently exist. Most of our outer universe did not exist until Hubble and his telescope, though it was and is real.

At the moment, human beings are the only things we are aware of that bring the things of the universe into existence. This is one of their central roles, along with the development of collective cultural evolution.

Social rank theory of depression

Motivation for achievement as perceived resource value in social rank theory of depression: A structural equation modeling analysis

Abstract

Perceived resource value reflects individual differences in motivation to acquire resource holding potential. The individualistic achievement (IA) trait, as measured by the Sociotropy Autonomy Scale, is a suitable measure for perceived resource value, and helps understand the social rank theory of depression. The present study aims to evaluate this suggestion using structural equation modeling analysis. A total of 199 university students filled out the IA subscale of the SAS, Positive and Negative Affect Scale, Social Adaptation Self-Evaluation Scale, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and Beck Depression Inventory. As predicted, IA was significantly associated with social dominance as measured by the sum of Z-scores of self-esteem, social functioning and positive affect (r = 0.44) and negative emotion as measured by the sum of Z-scores of depression and negative affects (r = −0.15) and dominance was significantly negatively associated with negative emotion (r = −0.47). Structural equation modeling analysis reveals a good fit of the proposed model that IA trait increases social dominance which reduces negative emotion. Furthermore, the social dominance and negative emotion showed a reciprocal relationship. These preliminary results suggest that IA is a suitable measurement for perceived resource value of social rank theory in humans. This measurement is expected to facilitate understanding of the development of depression.



Wai S. Tse, Jayne Wu, Kai-Chung Poon

The Varieties of Unconsicous Experience

Cf: Eagleman The Secret Lives of the Brain

We’ve long sensed that a great deal of what happens in our lives is profoundly influenced by forces that are beyond our control yet seem to emanate from within us. Freud developed his theory of the unconscious, with its id and ego as an attempt to investigate this phenomenon. One key question is to ask how about how social structures developed in pre-Homo Sapiens societies, the history as it were of of the alfa male harem structure, and how it has influenced and shaped several aspects of our unconscious experience.

The unconscious includes the autonomous nervous system, with direct stimulus response circuits. Withdrawal from flame, blushing etc. Embarrassment is a social emotion that triggers this blushing response. If the response comes from triggering mechanisms within the limbic system, this shows how our brains have gradually rewired for socially adaptive reasons within the framework of that pre historic social structure.

One aspect of experience that we tend to put down to the unconscious is within a ‘stimulus-response’ situation when our response is not consciously deliberated and chosen. Whenever we respond to a situation without deliberately choosing our response, it feels like ‘the unconscious’ is acting within us. In fact, this can happen for many reasons.

Habituation (pavlovian) operates at the most simple level, but can soon become a physiological reaction.

Then there is the automatic unconscious, which is easily seen in those repetitive tasks like typing, reading, or driving, which once learned we no longer need consciously to attend to to perform them. Sometimes called performative memory.

The ‘non conscious’ can be understood as that reservoir of self, memories, attitudes, beliefs, scripts, values, expectations that are there to be tapped into or brought to bear when needed. They are the ‘potential’ inherent in our individuality, or character. They can be changed with education and awareness, and contribute in a key way to letting us feel human. These scripts (or what Srimukar Rao calls ‘mental models’ are what most feels like a ‘non conscious’ in the sense that we react predictably to things without having necessarily made a conscious choice to do so, and sort of assume that we do so ‘because that’s who we are’, as if determined.

Biological determinism: Sapolsky has discussed Toxoplasmosis as the first biologically triggered modifier of behaviour. It is supposed to make people more reckless. We can assume that we will find other neurotransmitters and brain chemicals that have a predictable and automatic influence on behaviour, and thus appear as unconscious influences.

Drives and Instincts: range from ancient behavioiural scripts such as the fight or flight response, to long term drives towards dominance within a group. The wide variety of instincts and drives are in my opinion what humans are most affected by and what they largely mean when referring to the unconsious. Most of our emotional life emerges from instincts and drives, either remaining unconscious or emerging into consciousness as fears and desires, then meeting resistance in the world and producing a variety of emotional responses that are largely predictable. This predictability we think of both as ‘who we are’ and as our ‘unconscious’. The fact that we share these responses with most normal people doesn’t diminish our sense that they are personal and unique to us. Understanding, and helping to modulate these flows of emotions, expectations, desires, etc is key to being able to enjoy a fruitful and not too frustrated existence.