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Social Learning
Many animals, including humans, acquire valuable skills and knowledge by copying others. Scientists refer to this as social learning. It is one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of behavioral research and sits at the interface of many academic disciplines, including biology, experimental psychology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience. Social Learning provides a comprehensive, practical guide to the research methods of this important emerging field. William Hoppitt and Kevin Laland define the mechanisms thought to underlie social learning and demonstrate how to distinguish them experimentally in the laboratory. They present techniques for detecting and quantifying social le...
Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture
Attempts to understand the origins of humanity have raised fundamental questions about the complex relationship between cognition and culture. Central to the debates on origins is the role of religion, religious ritual and religious experience. What came first: individual religious (ecstatic) experiences, collective observances of transition situations, fear of death, ritual competence, magical coercion; mirror neurons or temporal lobe religiosity? Cognitive scientists are now providing us with important insights on phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes. Together with insights from the humanities and social sciences on the origins, development and maintenance of complex semiotic, social and cultural systems, a general picture of what is particularly human about humans could emerge. Reflections on the preconditions for symbolic and linguistic competence and practice are now within our grasp. Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture puts culture centre stage in the cognitive science of religion.
The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research
Network research has recently been adopted as one of the tools of the trade in archaeology, used to study a wide range of topics: interactions between island communities, movements through urban spaces, visibility in past landscapes, material culture similarity, exchange, and much more. This Handbook is the first authoritative reference work for archaeological network research, featuring current topical trends and covering the archaeological application of network methods and theories. This is elaborately demonstrated through substantive topics and case studies drawn from a breadth of periods and cultures in world archaeology. It highlights and further develops the unique contributions made by archaeological research to network science, especially concerning the development of spatial and material culture network methods and approaches to studying long-term network change. This is the go-to resource for students and scholars wishing to explore how network science can be applied in archaeology through an up-to-date overview of the field.
Evolution, Development and Complexity
This book explores the universe and its subsystems from the three lenses of evolutionary (contingent), developmental (predictable), and complex (adaptive) processes at all scales. It draws from prolific experts within the academic disciplines of complexity science, physical science, information and computer science, theoretical and evo-devo biology, cosmology, astrobiology, evolutionary theory, developmental theory, and philosophy. The chapters come from a Satellite Meeting, "Evolution, Development and Complexity" (EDC) hosted at the Conference on Complex Systems, in Cancun, 2017. The contributions have been peer-reviewed and contributors from outside the conference were invited to submit chapters to ensure full coverage of the topics. This book explores many issues within the field of EDC such as the interaction of evolutionary stochasticity and developmental determinism in biological systems and what they might teach us about these twin processes in other complex systems. This text will appeal to students and researchers within the complex systems and EDC fields.
Comparative Vertebrate Cognition
This book explores afresh the long-standing interest, and emphasis on, the `special' capacities of primates. Some of the recent discoveries of the higher cognitive abilities of other mammals and also birds challenge the concept that primates are special and even the view that the cognitive ability of apes is more advanced than that of nonprimate mammals and birds. It is therefore timely to ask whether primates are, in fact, special and to do so from a broad range of perspectives. Divided into five sections this book deals with topics about higher cognition and how it is manifested in different species, and also considers aspects of brain structure that might be associated with complex behavior.
A Philosopher Looks at the Natural World
This book interweaves the author’s personal story and observations of nature, with scientific research, and philosophical reflection. It tells the story of nearly three decades of labor to ecologically restore twenty-one acres of ruined land near Dayton, Ohio. This story and what the author has observed motivate reflection on the human relationship to soil, the inner lives of animals, the intelligence of plants, and human psychology. The book advances the case for the intelligence and kinship of all living things, an ethic of respect for life, and the need to radically rethink how human societies live on Earth.
Corruption and Government
The second edition of Corruption and Government updates Susan Rose-Ackerman's 1999 book to address emerging issues and to rethink old questions in light of new data. The book analyzes the research explosion that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall, the founding of Transparency International, and the World Bank's decision to give anti-corruption policy a key place on its agenda. Time has vindicated Rose-Ackerman's emphasis on institutional reform as the necessary condition for serious progress. The book deals with routine payoffs and with corruption in contracting and privatization. It gives special attention to political corruption and to instruments of accountability. The authors have expanded the treatment of culture as a source of entrenched corruption and added chapters on criminal law, organized crime, and post-conflict societies. The book outlines domestic conditions for reform and discusses international initiatives - including both explicit anti-corruption policies and efforts to constrain money laundering.
Human Evolutionary Demography
Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines. By bridging the boundaries between social and biological sciences, the volume stresses the importance of a unified understanding of both in order to grasp past and current demographic patterns. Demographic traits, and traits related to demographic outcomes, including fertility and mortality rates, marriage, parental care, menopause, and cooperative b...
Ecological Moral Character
"This book of metaethics focuses on Catholic virtue theory. To create an ecological model through which we can imagine the human moral character, the book integrates concepts of ecology with Aquinas' vision of moral character. The book describes the dynamics of a moral character in terms of the processes and functions that take place in an ecosystem. The virtues parallel species and other aspects of ecosystems, and other participants, such as the passions, the will, and the intellect, are also described in terms of this model. The book is a creative project with a solid and documented scholarly foundation. It aims to begin a conversation about a rarely discussed aspect of virtue ethics. The images we use to think about moral character are powerful. They inform our understandings of the moral virtues and the ways in which moral character develops. The book asks readers to choose deliberately the models we use to imagine moral character and offers this ecological virtue model as a good example for our own time"--
Chimpanzee Culture Wars
Decades later, starting in the 1980s, Japanese cultural primatology was given a second look as Euro-American primatologists began to debate amongst themselves the question of whether Homo sapiens is the only cultural animal. In the most recent chapter of this controversy, field researchers such as the Swiss primatologist Christophe Boesch have accused experimental psychologists such as Michael Tomasello of underestimating and even denying the capacity of chimpanzees for culture because they limit their studies to captive animals, brought up under cognitively debilitating conditions and tested in laboratory settings bound to favor human test subjects with whom the animals are compared. These controversies raise serious questions about what sort of laboratory culture is best for the study of primate cognition. .
