Giorgio Bertini
Research Professor on society, culture, art, cognition, critical thinking, intelligence, creativity, neuroscience, autopoiesis, self-organization, complexity, systems, networks, rhizomes, leadership, sustainability, thinkers, futures ++
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Author Archives: Giorgio Bertini
The evolution of cognitive mechanisms in response to cultural innovations
When humans and other animals make cultural innovations, they also change their environment, thereby imposing new selective pressures that can modify their biological traits. For example, there is evidence that dairy farming by humans favored alleles for adult lactose tolerance. … Continue reading
Posted in Cognitive evolution, Cultural innovations
Tagged Cognitive evolution, cultural innovations
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What is cumulative cultural evolution?
In recent years, the phenomenon of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has become the focus of major research interest in biology, psychology and anthropology. Some researchers argue that CCE is unique to humans and underlies our extraordinary evolutionary success as a … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural evolution
Tagged cultural evolution
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An evolutionary timeline of Homo Sapiens
The long evolutionary journey that created modern humans began with a single step—or more accurately—with the ability to walk on two legs. One of our earliest-known ancestors, Sahelanthropus, began the slow transition from ape-like movement some six million years ago, … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution, Homo sapiens
Tagged evolution, Homo sapiens
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Game-Changing Innovations: How Culture Can Change the Parameters of Its Own Evolution and Induce Abrupt Cultural Shifts
One of the most puzzling features of the prehistoric record of hominid stone tools is its apparent punctuation: it consists of abrupt bursts of dramatic change that separate long periods of largely unchanging technology. Within each such period, small punctuated … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural innovations
Tagged cultural innovations
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Cultural Innovations and Demographic Change
Demography plays a large role in cultural evolution through its effects on the effective rate of innovation. If we assume that useful inventions are rare, then small isolated societies will have low rates of invention. In small populations, complex technology … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural innovations
Tagged cultural innovations
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Role of Peers in Cultural Innovation and Cultural Transmission
Observations of the spontaneous play behaviors of a group of captive bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) revealed that each individual calf’s play became more complex with increasing age, suggesting that dolphin play may facilitate the ontogeny and maintenance of flexible problem … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural innovations
Tagged cultural innovations
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The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural evolution, Human evolution, Sociocultural evolution
Tagged cultural evolution, human evolution, Sociocultural evolution
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Homo erectus—who, when and where: A survey
The state of information bearing on Homo erectus as developed since about 1960 is surveyed, with the resulting effects on problems. Definitions of H. erectus still rest on the Far Eastern samples (Chou‐k’ou‐tien/Java), and thus relate to late Lower to … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropology, Human evolution, Humans
Tagged anthropology, human evolution, humans
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Cultural transmission and ecological opportunity jointly shaped global patterns of reliance on agriculture
The evolution of agriculture improved food security and enabled significant increases in the size and complexity of human groups. Despite these positive effects, some societies never adopted these practices, became only partially reliant on them, or even reverted to foraging … Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Culture, Evolution
Tagged Agriculture, culture, evolution
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How observing others’ behavior can increase cooperation
The question of how to get people to work together has bedeviled society for millennia. Now a large-scale field experiment testing how to get more than 2,400 participants to prevent blackouts in the real world is supporting theoretical work on … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation
Tagged cooperation
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