Evolutionary Approaches to Cross-Cultural Anthropology

Abstract

This special issue "Evolutionary Approaches to Cross-Cultural Anthropology" brings together scholars from the fields of behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural evolution whose cross-cultural work draws on evolutionary theory and methods. The papers here are a subset of those presented at a symposium we organized for the 2011 meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research held in Charleston, South Carolina. Collectively, our authors show how an engagement with cultural variation has enriched evolutionary anthropology, and these papers showcase how cross-cultural research can benefit from the theoretical and methodological contributions of an evolutionary approach.

Cultural prerequisites of socioeconomic development

“…We increase statistical power by including a random effect λ n for each nation n, which allows us to include the 109 ten-decade time series for all nations in a single test. To control for the nonindependence of nations [38,39], we add a second random effect for language family λ l as a proxy for cultural relatedness [40]. This controls for the possible diffusion of information between culturally similar nations, given that shared cultural and historical origins often facilitate the spread of political and economic changes [41][42][43].…”

Quantifying uncertainty in the phylogenetics of Australian numeral systems

“…Bayesian phylogenetic methods are relatively new to the study of linguistic prehistory, serving as a complement to the comparative method [19,20]. They were adapted from methods developed for evolutionary biology upon the realization that many of the properties of evolution have direct parallels in language change [7,21]. These statistical methods, particularly Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC [22]), have been successful in verifying conclusions drawn from more traditional linguistic methods as well as offering support for deeper and less obvious relationships (e.g.…”