Cultural Evolution of Socially Situated Cognition--论文代写范文精选

探讨认知所塑造的社会矩阵嵌入，这篇paper代写范文考虑使用出现的动态认知,通过自己的方式理解它,然后表达或实现他们的想法。文化的元素开始创造市场需求。他们随着时间变得越来越复杂。下面的paper代写范文进行论述。

Abstract
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is therefore commonly thought that elements of culture evolve through natural selection. However, natural selection was proposed to explain how change accumulates despite lack of inheritance of acquired traits, as occurs with template-mediated replication. It cannot accommodate a process with significant retention of acquired or horizontally (e.g. socially) transmitted traits. Moreover, elements of culture cannot be treated as discrete lineages because they constantly interact and influence one another. It is proposed that what evolves through culture is the mind; ideas and artifacts are merely reflections of its current evolved state. Interacting minds transform (in part) through through a non-Darwinian autopoietic process similar to that by which early life evolved, involving not survival of the fittest but actualization of their potential.
Key Words: acquired traits, autopoiesis, cultural evolution, natural selection, self-replication, social learning

Introduction
Other papers in this issue explore how cognition is shaped by the social matrix in which it is embedded. In this paper the reader is invited to take a step back and consider the dynamics that emerge when cognitive agents dont just learn from one another, but put their own spin on what they learn, make sense of it in their own terms, and then express or implement their take on the ideas to others. Elements of culture start to create niches for one another. They become more complex with time, such that they might be thought of as constituting cultural lineages.

Some treat cultural change as merely a facet or dimension of biological evolution (Jablonka & Lamb, 2006).[1] Others, while not denying that culture has a dramatic impact on biological life, argue that culture constitutes a form of evolution in its own right, a second evolutionary process. On Earth the two are deeply intertwined (as illustrated by phenomena such as genetic assimilation, the Baldwin effect, and the fact that biological life had to come into being before culture could take hold). But in principle they need not be. For example, in a computer program in which artificial agents invent and imitate ideas for new gestures, but neither die nor give birth, there is still evolution (Gabora, 1995). It is not the agents physical form that is evolving, but their ideas.

Fit gestures get imitated, and spread through the artificial society, while unfit gestures do not, such that over time the distribution of gestures implemented by agents becomes fitter. Indeed, cultural traits can be said to undergo descent with modification, and on the face of it cultural change is reminiscent of natural selection. It exhibits phenomena studied by population geneticists such as adaptation, punctuated equilibrium (Orsucci, in press), and drift (Bentley et al., 2004; Durham, 1991; Gabora, 1995), as well as features referred to by Mesoudi et al. (2004) as key Darwinian properties, including variation, competition, and inheritance. Cultural change is also cumulative; humans have a propensity to not just generate novelty but build on it cumulatively, adapting old ideas to new circumstances (the Ratchet effect). One individual modifies the basic idea of a cup by giving it a flat enough bottom to stay put when not in use, another adds a handle, making it easier to grasp, and yet another adds a spout, making it easier to pour from. Moreover, this cumulative change is adaptive. With each instantiation, the basic idea remains the same but the details change to make it more useful with respect to the prevailing situation or need. It is also complex and open-ended; there is no limit to the cultural novelty that can be generated.

This paper attempts to answer the question of whether the transmission and transformation of information across individuals occurs through a Darwinian process, and in what sense (if any) culture can rightly be said to evolve. We begin by examining why organisms do not inherit acquired characteristics, and how this impacts their evolution. This is key because acquired change is inherited in culture[2], though note that here inherited merely means transmitted or passed on without implying genetic mediation. To the extent that not inheriting acquired characteristics is central to how organisms evolve, answers from biology will not translate to culture. Noting that current origin of life theories suggest that the earliest life forms, referred to as protocells, also inherited acquired characteristics, we examine the hypothesis that the mechanisms by which culture evolves are more akin to those underlying the evolution of protocells than modern-day life.

Is Culture Darwinian?
It is often suggested that culture, or the creative ideas that propel it, evolve through a process that is Darwinian (e.g. Campbell, 1960; Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981; Cloak, 1973; Dawkins, 1975; Plotkin, 1994; Maschner, 1996; Cziko, 1997, 1998; Spencer, 1997; Simonton, 1998, 1999a, b; Aunger, 2000; Mesoudi et al., 2004, 2006). Mesoudi et al. (2004) argue that because Darwin knew nothing of genes when he proposed his theory of natural selection, rejecting a Darwinian theory of culture on the grounds that we do not know what might be the cultural equivalent of genes is to apply a criterion so strict it would have led early biologists to reject the fundamental case made for evolution through natural selection in The Origin. But this is not the case, for Darwins theory resolved a paradox that is nonexistent with respect to culture.

The paradox faced by Darwin and his contemporaries was to explain the following: how does change accumulate when acquired traits are lost? In most domains, change is retained, at least until another change overrides it. Once an asteroid has collided into a planet, for example, it does not revert back to the state of having not collided into a planet. But in biology there is a continual backtracking to an earlier state. Change arising during a lifetime, for example as a result of interaction with others, is obliterated at the end of each generation. A rat whose tail is cut off does not give birth to rats with cut tails. Thus the question that Darwins theory answered was: if new modifications keep getting discarded, how is it that the form of living things has changed over time? The ingenuity of his approach was to look for change at the level of the population rather than the individual. Individuals who are better equipped to survive in their given environment leave more offspring (are selected) and thus their traits are better represented in the next generation. Over generations this can lead to substantial change in the population of individuals as a whole.

The facts that inspired Darwins theory of natural selection are unique to biology. Neither social scientists nor cognitive scientists are faced with a similar paradox. Cultural traits and artifacts do inherit acquired characteristics, so change resulting through creative thought processes, or interaction with peers or other elements of the environment, are retained. Once someone came along with the idea of putting a handle on a cup, cups with handles were here to stay. Inheritance of acquired traits allows for change that is orders of magnitude faster than change mediated by natural selection (for example, later today you may retell this argument in simplified form for a child). Thus we do not share the biologists need to account for how change occurs despite a discarding of acquired traits each generation. It is therefore appropriate that Darwins solution not be embraced in a domain where the problem that solution was designed to solve does not exist.

Even if there is not the same pressing need to come up with a population-level mechanism of change as there was for biologists in Darwins time, might not still the evolution of culture be described in terms of natural selection?[3] This question no longer means what it would have meant in Darwins time because the theory of natural selection has been rendered in precise mathematical terms, and for natural selection to be applicable, the following criteria must be met. First, there must be a population of self-replicating entities. Second, individuals must be lost from the population and replaced by new ones, giving rise to discreet or overlapping generations. Third, there must be competition for scarce resources. (paper代写)

Fourth, there must be heritable random variation with respect to innate (genetically mediated) characteristics. Fifth, there must be no inheritance of acquired characteristics (or at least it must be negligible compared to change due to differential replication of individuals with heritable variation competing for scarce resources). In other words, natural selection cannot describe a process in which there is nothing prohibiting horizontal transmission from drowning out the effects of vertical transmission (or swamping the phylogenetic signal). This last condition (no inheritance of acquired traits) makes the mathematical description of biological change tractable because one is simply dealing with changes in the frequencies of physically realized (i.e. already existing) entities, and variants of them generated through random mutation. Actually, in many biological situations these assumptions are not fully met (e.g. assortative mating), but they manage to hold as useful approximations and in some cases the equations can be modified to account for systematic biases.

In biology one does not have to take into account potential variations to an entity that could come about through intuition, strategic thinking, or the myriad interactions it could have with the outside world. In social exchange, not only is acquired change inherited, but it comes about not through selection amongst competing randomly generated structures but through context-driven modification of existing structure. Orsucci (2002) refers to the set of cognitive states accessible from the current cognitive state as the adjacent possible. When an entity has the potential to change to many different states (given the various possible contexts it could interact with), we can say that it is in a potentiality state with respect to context (Gabora & Aerts, 2005).[4](paper代写)

51Due网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文著作权归51Due所有；未经51Due官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯著作权现象，51Due保留一切法律追诉权。
更多paper代写范文欢迎访问我们主页 www.51due.com 当然有paper代写需求可以和我们24小时在线客服QQ:800020041 联系交流。-X(paper代写)