From behavior to culture: An assessment of cultural evolution and a new synthesis

Kinship Algebra Expert System (KAES)

“…In another part, it raises questions about the evolutionary trajectory that leads from behavior centered around biological kin to behavior centered around cultural kin and whether that trajectory can be accommodated in a Darwinian evolutionary framework or whether it signals a change to social organization based on culturally constructed conceptual systems for which the idiom of descent with modification driven by reproductive success is no longer the primary driver for evolutionary change (cf. Read, 2003Read, , 2005.…”

A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi by Leo Coleman Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. 232 pp.

“…No reference made by him to the extensive, cross-disciplinary, and Darwinian-based theory of cultural evolution developed over the past several decades with the goal of accounting for the evolutionary appearance of Homo sapiens as a culture-bearing species. This endeavor has problems due to reducing culture to traits transmitted phenotypically (Lane et al 2009;Read 2003), but the absence of any reference to this research is striking. Bergendorff's more specific claim that "our early ancestors must have found a new way of sharing resources between groups .…”

Change in the Form of Evolution: Transition from Primate to Hominid Forms of Social Organization

“…The persons who receive the meat from the distributor do so on the basis of kin obligations between the owner of the arrow and his or her kin, where what constitutes kinship is culturally constructed by criteria that are not dictated by the biological relatedness of individuals (see Read 2003). Meat distribution is based on a conceptual system of obligations expressed in terms of culturally constructed kin relations that transcend the limitations of biologically based systems of cooperation and sharing.…”

“…Extensive research on kinship terminologies (Read 1984, Read and Behrens 1990, Read 2001, Read 2003, Bennardo and Read n.d.,) has established that a kinship terminology is a culturally constructed conceptual system with an underlying logic, or "grammar" that enables the conceptual system to be generated, much like an abstract algebra, from a set of symbols (the kin terms), a binary product for those symbols (the computations users of a terminology make with kin terms) and a set of structural equations that determine both structural features of terminologies in general (e.g., reciprocity of kin terms such as occurs with the kin terms father and son in the AKT) and the particular structural features that distinguish each of the variety of kinship terminologies that occur in human societies. From a modeling viewpoint, the underlying structural form for a kinship terminological system matches that of a semigroup when the kin terms are viewed as a set of symbols (in the mathematical/linguistic sense) with a binary product over that set defined by the computations individuals make with the terms to determine kin relations.…”