What Brought About the Capacity for Complex Culture--论文代写范文精选

在文化理论的基础上,认为人类文化独特，是因为内部的模型累积,构建的心理学，通过这样的模型也存在缺陷,比如复制错误(文化信息扭曲的从一个人传递到另一个)或墨守成规的偏见。下面的paper代写范文进行论述。

Abstract
  Many have noted that cultural evolution is cumulative. It has been suggested that this alone differentiates human culture from that of other species (Boyd & Richerson, 1996). Cumulative change is exhibited by a computer model of cultural evolution that uses conceptual structure to generate novelty (Gabora, 1995), but also by a model in which change accrues through mere copying error (Eerkins & Lipo, 2005). Indeed cumulative change is relatively easy to come by; in the days of taping music, each time the tape was copied it became cumulatively more scratched. This suggests that it is not just because human cultural evolution is cumulative that it is distinctive. It is distinctive because of what accumulates, and what accumulates is change that is complex, adaptive, and open-ended because it is born in a conceptual network powered by both associative thought (which detects relationships of correlation) and strategic thought (which detects relationships of causation). 

  Theories of culture based on the view that what makes human culture distinctive is that it is cumulative do not incorporate concepts and how they are related, let alone organized into an internal model of the world, or worldview. Nor do they incorporate how a worldview constrains and stimulates how novelty is generated through exploring not just what is but what could be. Efforts to build psychology into such models are limited to phenomena such as copying error (where cultural information is distorted as it passes from one individual to another) or conformist bias (a tendency to conform to what others are doing). But copying error and conformist bias hardly move us further along the path toward a theory that can account for the emergence of even simple acts of conceptual transfer such as the invention of marshmallows shaped like Smurfs let alone complex, collaborative manifestations of culture such as the production of Star Wars.

  The view that what makes human culture distinctive is merely that it is cumulative often goes hand in hand with the view that human cultural evolution arose through enhanced capacity for imitation. There are several versions of this; one of the more provocative is that proposed by Merlin Donald (1993). He argues that approximately two million years ago the mind underwent a transition from an episodic mode of cognitive functioning, which is more or less stuck in the here and now to a uniquely human mimetic mode, characterized by the capacity for mime, imitation, gesture, and the rehearsal of skill. 

  A problem with this proposal is that imitation is commonplace in other species, as are the mirror neurons that underlie imitative skill (Arbib, 2002). Moreover, the others – mime, gesture, and skill rehearsal – rely on what Karmiloff-Smith (1992) refers to as representational redescription (RR): the capacity to recursively operate on or manipulate the contents of thought and thereby refine an idea or motor act, or retrieve an event from the past through the linking of associations. Moreover, imitation, though possible without RR, would be enhanced by it; it would enable imitated skills to be reworked and perfected, perhaps one step at a time. Thus it seems more parsimonious to propose that the transition was due to the onset of RR, which enabled mime, gesture, and skill rehearsal, and merely enhanced imitation. 

  This simultaneously alleviates another problem with Donalds account: the idea that enhanced imitative capacity enabled us to become more firmly tethered in a cultural network, which was critical to the evolution of our distinctiveness. In fact as a species we exhibit the opposite tendency, to go our own way and do our own thing, and creative individuals, those who have the most transformative effect on culture, are the least tethered of all, with strong leanings toward isolation, nonconformity, rebelliousness, and unconventionality (Crutchfield, 1962; Griffin & McDermott, 1998; Sulloway, 1996). Thus the claim that imitative capacity is what gave rise to human culture is problematic.

 Summary and conclusions
  The human capacity to exchange and build on one anothers ideas has completely transformed this planet. It is tempting to describe the process of cultural change in Darwinian terms, in part because (1) the parallels between biology and culture are striking, and (2) Darwins theory had a profoundly unifying effect on biology. Indeed Mesoudi et al. (2004) rightly assert that culture exhibits key Darwinian properties. But having these properties does not imply that the mechanisms are similar, and they are not; indeed the paradox that necessitated the theory of natural selection in biology does not exist with respect to culture. 

 Early biologists were motivated by the need to explain how change accumulates in a domain where acquired traits are not retained at the individual level. Selection theory was accordingly designed to describe descent with modification at the population level, in organisms that do not inherit acquired characteristics because they are von Neumann self-replicating automata. Self-replicating automata use a self-assembly code that is both actively transcribed to produce a new individual, and passively copied to ensure that the new individual can itself reproduce. Cultural traits and artifacts are not self-replicating automata, even those such as a village plan that contain a code, because the code consists of instructions for how to generate something else, not a copy of itself. They are allopoietic, not autopoietic. Cultural traits do inherit acquired traits—the effects of creative modification or contextual interaction with the environment are retained. So cultural theorists do not share the biologists need to explain how change occurs in the face of periodic reversion to a previous state. Their challenge is to describe cognitive states that involve potentiality, and that change through interaction with an incompletely specified context, as occurs in (for example) dialogue or play.(paper代写)

  It is sometimes said that culture evolves without any sort of self-replicating structure, or that since the kind of modification with descent exhibited in culture cannot be described by natural selection, there is no theory of evolution that can explain cultural change (e.g. Fracchia & Lewontin, 1999). It does seem unlikely that culture involves von Neumann self-replicating automata. But natural selection of self-replicating automata is not the only means by which evolution can occur. Indeed another sort of process was necessary to get life to the point where it replicated using a self-assembly code and was thereby able to evolve through natural selection. Current widely held theories about the origin of life hold that protocells, the earliest forms of life, evolved through a non-Darwinian process. They self-replicated without a self-assembly code through autopoiesis, i.e. mutual regeneration of parts to reconstitute a new whole. Because uncoded self-replicating structures can inherit traits acquired between replication events, they may either survive intact or go extinct, or do something in between these two extremes: they can transform through the horizontal exchange of innovation.(paper代写)

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