Books by Dwight Read
“This book is extremely well-written and in my view is among the best synthesizers in human evolu... more “This book is extremely well-written and in my view is among the best synthesizers in human evolution study. Dwight provides a much-needed clarity and guidance on what makes us humans. I strongly recommended.” Amazon (Independent Reviewer), Dr. Paulo Finuras, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Lisbon
“Read effectively uses theory-of-mind concepts and recent work in the extended mind/social-brain realm (e.g., Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010) as central components in modeling the development of human social relationships from a broader primate behavioral profile. I greatly appreciate his connection between cognitive processes and the expansion of social complexity and complex kinship systems in humans. Importantly, Read notes how direct comparisons between human and other primate social structure are rife with problems and that while we share much with our primate kin, core areas such as working memory and other cognitive processes differentiate us…. In sum, I agree with Read’s notion of innovation in the human lineage and his proposal for what that innovation entails,…” Current Anthropology, Agustus Fuentes, University of Notre Dame
“How Culture Makes Us Human is an intriguing book that I like very much. My appreciation stems from the author’s ability to explicitly outline the cognitive capabilities within various primate lineages in order to demonstrate qualities of mind that allow for a cultural kinship system to develop. …Our species’ expanded intellectual capacities introduces cultural group selection… The author acknowledges this process and portrays culture as a conceptual system, in Tylor-like fashion, rather than focus on the transmission of individual culture traits as typically posited by gene-culture coevolutionary theorists and memeticists….Clearly written … I recommend it highly …” Anthropology Review Database, Dr. William Yaworsky, University of Texas at Brownsville
“… Read (UCLA) argues for the emergence of enhanced cognitive abilities …as a driving force behind human behavioral evolution. The author reviews the diversity of social systems among Old World monkeys and chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, in an attempt to establish the foundations of human social organization. The book leads readers from an appreciation of the complexities of monkey and ape societies to an understanding of the sophistication of modern human communities; this transition is accompanied by an organizational shift from biological kin selection to cultural group selection. In sum, a provocative book with tantalizing ideas,…” Choice, R.A.Delgado Jr. , University of Southern California
Abstract
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.
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From the Preface:
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the deve... more From the Preface:
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.
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"Eleven carefully crafted, thoughtful chapters span the history, method, and theory of the classi... more "Eleven carefully crafted, thoughtful chapters span the history, method, and theory of the classification of material culture. Among other topics, Read considers intuitive and objective classifications, paradigms, patterning, numerical taxonomy, modality, and variable redundancy. Read's research on stone tools and ceramics and his pedagogical skills help fine tune the narrative and make a difficult, complex subject informative, instructive, and readable. Summing Up: Highly recommended. "
- C. C. Kolb, National Endowment for the Humanities in CHOICE
"This important contribution summarises a lifetime involvement with teaching, developing and debating approaches to artifact classifi cation. Dwight Read brings to this task his own varied contributions and highly-developed logical and mathematical skills. It is a valuable study of some key issues in and approaches to archaeological practice."
- David Frankel, Australian Archaeology
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014
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Human beings have two outstanding characteristics compared to all other species: the apparently e... more Human beings have two outstanding characteristics compared to all other species: the apparently enormous elaboration of our thought through language and symbolism and the elaboration of our forms of social organization. The view taken in Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane is that these are intimately interconnected. To understand this connection, the book compares the structure of the systems of thought that organizations are built upon with the organizational basis of human thinking as such. An experimental method is used, leading to a new science of the structure of human social organizations in two senses. First, it gives rise to a new kind of ethnology that has the combination of empirical solidity and formal analytical rigor associated with the “paradigmatic” sciences. Second, it makes evident that social organizations have distinctive properties and require distinctive explanations of a sort that cannot be reduced to the explanations drawn from, or grounded in, these other sciences.
Human social organizations are created by people using systems of ideas with very specific logical properties. This book describes what these idea-systems are with an unbroken chain of analysis that begins with field elicitation and continues by working out their most fundamental, logico-mathematical generative elements. This enables us to see precisely how these idea systems are used to generate organizations that give pattern to ongoing behavior. The book shows how organizations are objectified by community members through symbolic representations that provide them with shared conceptions of organizations, roles, or relations that they see each other as participating in. The case for this constructive process being pan-Homo sapiens is described, spanning all human communities from the Upper Paleolithic to today, and from the most seemingly primitive Australian tribes to modern-day America and India. While focusing primarily on kinship, Human Thought and Social Organization shows how the analysis applies with equal precision to other social areas ranging from farming to political factionalism.
Review
“… Read and Leaf, in this highly stimulating book, present a novel, coherent theory about the co-evolution of human thought and language on the one hand, and human social organization on the other. They do so by shifting the perspective from cognitive development essentially happening within the human mind – to viewing it as driven by people's interactions with the outside material, environmental and social worlds. In doing so, they bring us a much more coherent and comprehensible history of human cognitive evolution than any I have seen thus far.”—
(Sander van der Leeuw Ph.D, Arizona State University )
This book by Murray Leaf and Dwight Read is both brilliant and revolutionary. It puts socio-cultural anthropology in a context that understands human social behavior as cognitively “governed,” i.e., not generated by ideas but rather made interpretable, and therefore interactive, by mental rules. These “rules” of conceptual government finally allow serious algebraic-mathematical analysis of social-cultural behavior and idea systems as formal science properly grounded in relevant technical philosophy in a genuine evolutionary framework.—
(F. K. Lehman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign )
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Introduction to the Science of Kinship, 2021
Kinship is a human universal. Every known human society has a system of relationships that anthr... more Kinship is a human universal. Every known human society has a system of relationships that anthropologists recognize as the counterparts of their own ideas of parents and their children. Through them, each person becomes part of a wider network of kinship relations that provides the main part of their initial protection, food, shelter, and introduction to human culture and social organization.
We now know what terminologies are and why the efforts to analyze them have been so confused. There are distinct sets of terms, as anthropologists recognized, but that is not what is most important. What is most important are the ideas that make up the definitions of the terms. These are systematically interrelated and have a definite logical structure. We represent this by what we call a kinship map. Our method for eliciting it is an adaptation of frame analysis that has long been used in linguistics and other fields. This is an experimental method, in exactly the same sense the methods of biology or chemistry are experimental.
Second, we have a method for analyzing this logical structure, showing precisely what it is for any kinship map, and to a large extent also why it is this and not something else. We represent this logical structure by the kin term map, in contrast to the kinship map. The method for eliciting the kinship map was developed by Murray Leaf. The method for exposing and analyzing the kin term map was developed by Dwight Read.
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Encyclopedia Articles by Dwight Read
Kinship, one of the universals of human socie-ties, involves systems of reciprocal social relatio... more Kinship, one of the universals of human socie-ties, involves systems of reciprocal social relations. All societies conceptually organize societal members, to one degree or another, through structured, reciprocal systems of relations. The relations making up a kinship system are broad in their scope and interdigitate with religious, economic, political and other social systems. Kinship relations incorporate, as part of their cultural meaning, rights and obligations of kin, including expected (through not always realized) mutually supportive behavior by kin. The system of kinship relations serves as a conceptual framework within which individuals formulate their behavior towards their kin and it provides a basis for interpreting the meaning and implications of the behavior of their kin to them.
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The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018
Kinship is a universal of human societies, built around systems of self-centric, reciprocal socia... more Kinship is a universal of human societies, built around systems of self-centric, reciprocal social relations. In all societies, societal members are conceptually organized, to one degree or another, through structured, reciprocal systems of relations. Kinship systems are broad in their scope and interdigitate with religious, economic, political and other social systems. The kinship relations that are part of a kinship system include, in
their cultural meaning, the rights and obligations of kin, including expected (through not always realized) mutually supportive behavior by kin. The system of kin-term relations provides a kinship framework within which individuals formulate how they interact with their kin and a basis for interpreting the meaning and implications of the behavior of their kin to them. The kinship framework may also involve a culturally formulated ideology regarding the role and nature of the respective contribution of male and of a female to the formation of an offspring and to its emotional and mental make-up. Despite a biological mode of reproduction being a constant for all humans, local ideologies and accounts of reproduction vary extensively across human societies; hence these idea systems cannot simply be reduced to epiphenomena of biological reproduction. A group’s ideas about procreation, along with its ideas about kinship relations in general, provide for the social identity of a newborn offspring through the
family social unit (ranging in form from single parent to extended family) into which it is born and to its position in an already existing network of kinship relations into which it is entering through kinship relations recognized at birth. Kinship relations also provide an idiom through which forms of social organization are expressed in human societies—especially in pre-state societies—whether the society is a small, hunter-gatherer group or a large, modern industrial state.
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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd edition), Apr 2015
Kinship involves social interactions and forms of social organization based on systems of cultura... more Kinship involves social interactions and forms of social organization based on systems of culturally constructed social relations expressed linguistically through the kin terms constituting a kinship terminology. The organization and structure for these social relations expressed in a kinship terminology is formally modeled here as being part of an axiomatic theory in which a few, primary kinship concepts are the equivalent of axioms in a mathematical theory. The cultural knowledge embedded in a kinship terminology therefore is part of a cultural theory – analogous to a mathematical theory – that expresses the culturally salient kinship properties derived from the primary kinship concepts.
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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd edition), Apr 2015
Kinship terminologies consist of the terms used to reference culturally recognized kinship relati... more Kinship terminologies consist of the terms used to reference culturally recognized kinship relations between persons. These
terms have been assumed to identify categories of genealogical relations (despite ethnographic evidence to the contrary), and kinship terminologies are classified using differences in genealogical referents of kin terms. Recent analysis, however, by building on ethnographically validated procedures for computing kin relations from kin terms without reference to genealogy makes evident the underlying generative logic for the structure of kinship terminologies. Making the generative logic of terminologies explicit provides a more rigorous comparative basis for the study of kinship terminology systems.
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The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences, 2018
Classification has been crucial to the archaeological enterprise from its inception. Its importan... more Classification has been crucial to the archaeological enterprise from its inception. Its importance ranges from the pragmatic-a way to arrange artifactual material in an orderly manner-to the analytic-a means to construct a "window" opening onto the lifeway of a past group of people inferred from the traces of their behavior expressed through patterning in artifactual material. From a pragmatic perspective, a classification may be based on the material (see chromatography and archaeological materials analysis) from which an artifact is made, its morphological form, its inferred func-tionality, the technology (see archaeologies of technology) underlying its production, the time period of its occurrence (see dating in archaeology), the cultural context in which it occurs (or is believed to occur), its occurrence together with other artifacts, and so on. Archaeological classification, in its most basic sense, involves forming classes of artifacts whose members are considered to be equivalent for analytical and interpretive purposes. In this sense, archaeological classification can be thought of as a division of a collection of objects into disjoint and exhaustive classes-an operation known formally as a partition. The rationale for the divisions may range from being empirical, for example when the division is based on properties of the artifacts, to being conceptual, for example when the division is created using constructs developed as part of the archaeologist's understanding of how the material domain integrated with the lifeway of the producers and users of the artifacts that have been recovered. A classification needs to be rigorous, consistent, and replicable.
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The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences., 2018
Factor analysis (FA), like principal component analysis (PCA), involves reducing the dimension-al... more Factor analysis (FA), like principal component analysis (PCA), involves reducing the dimension-ality of the measurement space computed over the dataset brought forward for analysis. The two differ by PCA typically being used in exploratory data analysis aimed at inferring patterning in the dataset brought forward for analysis, whereas FA involves confirmatory data analysis aimed at accepting or rejecting a model hypothesized to represent the patterning in the dataset. Both procedures reduce redundancy in the dimensionality of the measurement space for the dataset. With archaeological data, dimensionality redundancy arises when the number of variables the archaeologist selects for measurement of artifacts over-represents the likely number of dimensions that were under control when making an artifact. For example, the projectile points from the 4 VEN39 site in Ventura Count in California were measured using seven metric attributes, although it is highly unlikely that a producer kept seven dimensions in mind when making a projectile point. With multivariate data, exploratory data analysis is often employed due to lack of adequate theories from which a model specifying the anticipated patterning in the dataset may be proposed. Dimensionality reduction also enables visual presentation of the data in the form of histograms for a single variable or scattergram plots in two or three dimensions. Both FA and PCA employ visual representation for discerning the structure of the data being analyzed. Although dimensionality can be reduced by simply restricting the analysis to one or two variables at a time, patterning that involves several variables is then difficult to discern. Instead, dimensionality reduction is aimed at removing redundancy in the dimensionality of the measurement space for the dataset.
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Book Chapters by Dwight Read
Terrain [en ligne], Dec 15, 2022
French: Les relations de parenté sont conçues comme comprenant à la fois des relations généalogiq... more French: Les relations de parenté sont conçues comme comprenant à la fois des relations généalogiques entre individus et des relations terminologiques identifiées par les termes de parenté qu’un locuteur utilise en référence à d’autres individus. La connexion entre procréation et relations de parenté est ontologiquement multiple, allant du comportement structuré au niveau phénoménal aux systèmes terminologiques abstraits au niveau idéationnel. La procréation fournit un fondement commun pour la construction de systèmes conceptuels qui peuvent varier.
English: Kinship relations are understood to incorporate both genealogical relations among individuals and kin term relations identified through the kin terms a speaker uses in reference to other individuals. The connection between procreation and kinship relations is ontologically multi-threaded, leading from patterned behavior at the phenomenal level to abstract terminological systems at the ideational level. Procreation, Paratio suggests, provides a common foundation for the construction of variable conceptual systems of kinship relations.
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I hypothesize that the terminological space provides a framework for defining the world of kin wi... more I hypothesize that the terminological space provides a framework for defining the world of kin without presupposing that the kinship world is genealogical. Cultural rules of instantiation give kin terms genealogical reference and thereby the problem of presuming parenthood defined via reproduction as a universal basis for kinship is circumvented. The terminological space is constrained by general, structural properties that make it a “kinship space” and structural equations that give it its particular form. A mapping from the terminological space to the genealogical grid can be constructed under a straightforward mapping of the generating symbols of the terminological structure onto the primary kin types. This implies that it will always be possible to provide a genealogical “meaning” of the kin terms. Whether the genealogical “meaning” so constructed has cultural salience is at the heart of Schneider’s critique of kinship based on a presumed universal genealogical grid.
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Integrating Qualitative and Social Science Factors in Archaeological Modelling, 2019
Anthropological research has long established the central importance in human societies of the sh... more Anthropological research has long established the central importance in human societies of the shared, conceptual systems of social relations we refer to as kinship systems in providing a foundation for culturally formulated systems of social interaction. Historically, and from an evolutionary perspective, kinship systems came into play even before the Upper Paleolithic as our ancestors worked out, during hominin evolution, a qualitative transformation away from the individualistic, face-to-face systems of social interaction of the great apes to the relation-based systems of social interaction that characterize human societies. This transformation, realized through the monumental intellectual achievement of working out computational systems of kinship relations expressed through kinship terminologies, has also provided a framework for accommodating two diametrically opposed drivers of social interaction: the centrifugal effect of individual interests and the centripetal effect of social constraints.
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Essays on Focality and Extension and their Wider Implications in Memory of Harold W. Scheffler (edited by Warren Shapiro), 2018
Hal Scheffler was one of the world’s great anthropologists and, without question, its foremost au... more Hal Scheffler was one of the world’s great anthropologists and, without question, its foremost authority on human kinship. These considerations in themselves would be quite enough to merit a collection of essays in his memory, but his work also touches upon certain larger issues in our appreciation of the human condition, as well as current social controversies.
It was for his extensionist position on kinship terminologies—what he liked to call ‘systems of kin classification’—that he was best known. In a nutshell, Scheffler would come to raise two questions: (1) What is the primary meaning—what he called the focus—of kinship terms like English ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’ etc.? (2) By what procedures do people extend these meanings from their foci to others? His answers, based upon meticulous analyses of kinship terminologies in various parts of the world, were that focal membership is supplied mostly by nuclear family relationships, from which relationships it is extended to people even to things—outside the nuclear family; and that these extensions are accomplished by ordered sets of rules that have considerable generality cross-culturally.
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Essays on Focality and Extension and their Wider Implications in Memory of Harold W. Scheffler (edited by Warren Shapiro), 2018
A long-standing issue in kinship theory stems from the presence of kinship terminologies with kin... more A long-standing issue in kinship theory stems from the presence of kinship terminologies with kin terms having genealogical referents crosscutting, rather than following, the pattern for genealogical relations. The notion that the genealogical referents should be in agreement with genealogical relations arises from the assumption, going back to Lewis Henry Morgan, that the kinship relations identified through a kinship terminology are based on procreation in conjunction with marriage. If both kin terms and genealogical relations are determined mainly through procreation, then, at first glance, it appears that they should be mutually consistent, but this is not the case for some terminologies. Despite attempts from Morgan onwards to account for this seeming anomaly, the issue still remains unresolved. Much of the writing of Harold Scheffler, both alone and in conjunction with Floyd Lounsbury, was directed towards a possible resolution of the ‘extension problem’ of a terminology having kin terms with both close and distant genealogical referents. Though their project did not achieve all of its goals, it did establish that terminologies are not just a collection of terms with genealogical referents whose patterning is determined by external factors but must have an internal logic. In my chapter I begin where the work of Scheffler and Lounsbury left off, namely by working out the internal logic of kinship terminologies and using this logic to resolve the extension
problem.
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Genealogical Mathematics, Jan 1, 1974
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Kinship Systems: Change and Reconstruction Iedited by McConvell, P., I. Keen, and R. Hendery, pp. 59-91. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press), 2013
In this chapter l consider the developmental aspect of kinship systems by focusing on a single re... more In this chapter l consider the developmental aspect of kinship systems by focusing on a single region in which we can identify time-based structural changes in the formal aspects of kinship terminologies for the populations in that region. Terminologies from the Polynesian region will be used for this purpose since the broad pattern of prehistoric populations moving into this region, as well as the genetic relations among the Polynesian languages, have already been worked out from archaeological, genetic, and linguistic data. Methodologically, I first delineate the formal structure of Polynesian kinship terminologies in the ethnographic present. Then I identify an implied, temporal pattern of structural changes from the ethnographic past that accounts for the differences in present-day terminology structures. Next, I construct a kinship tree of genetic relations among these kinship terminologies in analogy with a language tree. To do this, I use methods analogous to those employed in historical linguistics for developing a language tree depicting genetic relations among related languages. I then compare the kinship tree with a language tree for the same populations so as to assess whether the cultural systems of
language and kinship change in parallel. I find that this is not the case, so our understanding of kinship terminology structure cannot simply be subsumed under the study of linguistic structures as has been widely assumed. I conclude by comparing changes in the structural and linguistic aspects of the same terminologies so as to enrich our understanding of the factors influencing the development of kinship terminologies through time. This will increase our understanding of the time-based development of kinship systems.
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Mathematical representations need to delineate the “principles that may be presumed to be at work... more Mathematical representations need to delineate the “principles that may be presumed to be at work at their source” (Lounsbury 1964:351) in the form of “ generative models which reproduce … the logic” (Bourdieu 1990[1980]:92) that accounts for “how the cultural constructs are generated” (Schneider 1968:7), and thereby enables us to “uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts” (Geertz 1973:27). Mathematical representations of cultural constructs can provide the analytical means to achieve these goals for the analysis of cultural phenomena precisely because of what constitutes mathematical reasoning.
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Books by Dwight Read
“Read effectively uses theory-of-mind concepts and recent work in the extended mind/social-brain realm (e.g., Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010) as central components in modeling the development of human social relationships from a broader primate behavioral profile. I greatly appreciate his connection between cognitive processes and the expansion of social complexity and complex kinship systems in humans. Importantly, Read notes how direct comparisons between human and other primate social structure are rife with problems and that while we share much with our primate kin, core areas such as working memory and other cognitive processes differentiate us…. In sum, I agree with Read’s notion of innovation in the human lineage and his proposal for what that innovation entails,…” Current Anthropology, Agustus Fuentes, University of Notre Dame
“How Culture Makes Us Human is an intriguing book that I like very much. My appreciation stems from the author’s ability to explicitly outline the cognitive capabilities within various primate lineages in order to demonstrate qualities of mind that allow for a cultural kinship system to develop. …Our species’ expanded intellectual capacities introduces cultural group selection… The author acknowledges this process and portrays culture as a conceptual system, in Tylor-like fashion, rather than focus on the transmission of individual culture traits as typically posited by gene-culture coevolutionary theorists and memeticists….Clearly written … I recommend it highly …” Anthropology Review Database, Dr. William Yaworsky, University of Texas at Brownsville
“… Read (UCLA) argues for the emergence of enhanced cognitive abilities …as a driving force behind human behavioral evolution. The author reviews the diversity of social systems among Old World monkeys and chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, in an attempt to establish the foundations of human social organization. The book leads readers from an appreciation of the complexities of monkey and ape societies to an understanding of the sophistication of modern human communities; this transition is accompanied by an organizational shift from biological kin selection to cultural group selection. In sum, a provocative book with tantalizing ideas,…” Choice, R.A.Delgado Jr. , University of Southern California
Abstract
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.
- C. C. Kolb, National Endowment for the Humanities in CHOICE
"This important contribution summarises a lifetime involvement with teaching, developing and debating approaches to artifact classifi cation. Dwight Read brings to this task his own varied contributions and highly-developed logical and mathematical skills. It is a valuable study of some key issues in and approaches to archaeological practice."
- David Frankel, Australian Archaeology
Human social organizations are created by people using systems of ideas with very specific logical properties. This book describes what these idea-systems are with an unbroken chain of analysis that begins with field elicitation and continues by working out their most fundamental, logico-mathematical generative elements. This enables us to see precisely how these idea systems are used to generate organizations that give pattern to ongoing behavior. The book shows how organizations are objectified by community members through symbolic representations that provide them with shared conceptions of organizations, roles, or relations that they see each other as participating in. The case for this constructive process being pan-Homo sapiens is described, spanning all human communities from the Upper Paleolithic to today, and from the most seemingly primitive Australian tribes to modern-day America and India. While focusing primarily on kinship, Human Thought and Social Organization shows how the analysis applies with equal precision to other social areas ranging from farming to political factionalism.
Review
“… Read and Leaf, in this highly stimulating book, present a novel, coherent theory about the co-evolution of human thought and language on the one hand, and human social organization on the other. They do so by shifting the perspective from cognitive development essentially happening within the human mind – to viewing it as driven by people's interactions with the outside material, environmental and social worlds. In doing so, they bring us a much more coherent and comprehensible history of human cognitive evolution than any I have seen thus far.”—
(Sander van der Leeuw Ph.D, Arizona State University )
This book by Murray Leaf and Dwight Read is both brilliant and revolutionary. It puts socio-cultural anthropology in a context that understands human social behavior as cognitively “governed,” i.e., not generated by ideas but rather made interpretable, and therefore interactive, by mental rules. These “rules” of conceptual government finally allow serious algebraic-mathematical analysis of social-cultural behavior and idea systems as formal science properly grounded in relevant technical philosophy in a genuine evolutionary framework.—
(F. K. Lehman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign )
We now know what terminologies are and why the efforts to analyze them have been so confused. There are distinct sets of terms, as anthropologists recognized, but that is not what is most important. What is most important are the ideas that make up the definitions of the terms. These are systematically interrelated and have a definite logical structure. We represent this by what we call a kinship map. Our method for eliciting it is an adaptation of frame analysis that has long been used in linguistics and other fields. This is an experimental method, in exactly the same sense the methods of biology or chemistry are experimental.
Second, we have a method for analyzing this logical structure, showing precisely what it is for any kinship map, and to a large extent also why it is this and not something else. We represent this logical structure by the kin term map, in contrast to the kinship map. The method for eliciting the kinship map was developed by Murray Leaf. The method for exposing and analyzing the kin term map was developed by Dwight Read.
Encyclopedia Articles by Dwight Read
their cultural meaning, the rights and obligations of kin, including expected (through not always realized) mutually supportive behavior by kin. The system of kin-term relations provides a kinship framework within which individuals formulate how they interact with their kin and a basis for interpreting the meaning and implications of the behavior of their kin to them. The kinship framework may also involve a culturally formulated ideology regarding the role and nature of the respective contribution of male and of a female to the formation of an offspring and to its emotional and mental make-up. Despite a biological mode of reproduction being a constant for all humans, local ideologies and accounts of reproduction vary extensively across human societies; hence these idea systems cannot simply be reduced to epiphenomena of biological reproduction. A group’s ideas about procreation, along with its ideas about kinship relations in general, provide for the social identity of a newborn offspring through the
family social unit (ranging in form from single parent to extended family) into which it is born and to its position in an already existing network of kinship relations into which it is entering through kinship relations recognized at birth. Kinship relations also provide an idiom through which forms of social organization are expressed in human societies—especially in pre-state societies—whether the society is a small, hunter-gatherer group or a large, modern industrial state.
terms have been assumed to identify categories of genealogical relations (despite ethnographic evidence to the contrary), and kinship terminologies are classified using differences in genealogical referents of kin terms. Recent analysis, however, by building on ethnographically validated procedures for computing kin relations from kin terms without reference to genealogy makes evident the underlying generative logic for the structure of kinship terminologies. Making the generative logic of terminologies explicit provides a more rigorous comparative basis for the study of kinship terminology systems.
Book Chapters by Dwight Read
English: Kinship relations are understood to incorporate both genealogical relations among individuals and kin term relations identified through the kin terms a speaker uses in reference to other individuals. The connection between procreation and kinship relations is ontologically multi-threaded, leading from patterned behavior at the phenomenal level to abstract terminological systems at the ideational level. Procreation, Paratio suggests, provides a common foundation for the construction of variable conceptual systems of kinship relations.
It was for his extensionist position on kinship terminologies—what he liked to call ‘systems of kin classification’—that he was best known. In a nutshell, Scheffler would come to raise two questions: (1) What is the primary meaning—what he called the focus—of kinship terms like English ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’ etc.? (2) By what procedures do people extend these meanings from their foci to others? His answers, based upon meticulous analyses of kinship terminologies in various parts of the world, were that focal membership is supplied mostly by nuclear family relationships, from which relationships it is extended to people even to things—outside the nuclear family; and that these extensions are accomplished by ordered sets of rules that have considerable generality cross-culturally.
problem.
language and kinship change in parallel. I find that this is not the case, so our understanding of kinship terminology structure cannot simply be subsumed under the study of linguistic structures as has been widely assumed. I conclude by comparing changes in the structural and linguistic aspects of the same terminologies so as to enrich our understanding of the factors influencing the development of kinship terminologies through time. This will increase our understanding of the time-based development of kinship systems.
“Read effectively uses theory-of-mind concepts and recent work in the extended mind/social-brain realm (e.g., Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010) as central components in modeling the development of human social relationships from a broader primate behavioral profile. I greatly appreciate his connection between cognitive processes and the expansion of social complexity and complex kinship systems in humans. Importantly, Read notes how direct comparisons between human and other primate social structure are rife with problems and that while we share much with our primate kin, core areas such as working memory and other cognitive processes differentiate us…. In sum, I agree with Read’s notion of innovation in the human lineage and his proposal for what that innovation entails,…” Current Anthropology, Agustus Fuentes, University of Notre Dame
“How Culture Makes Us Human is an intriguing book that I like very much. My appreciation stems from the author’s ability to explicitly outline the cognitive capabilities within various primate lineages in order to demonstrate qualities of mind that allow for a cultural kinship system to develop. …Our species’ expanded intellectual capacities introduces cultural group selection… The author acknowledges this process and portrays culture as a conceptual system, in Tylor-like fashion, rather than focus on the transmission of individual culture traits as typically posited by gene-culture coevolutionary theorists and memeticists….Clearly written … I recommend it highly …” Anthropology Review Database, Dr. William Yaworsky, University of Texas at Brownsville
“… Read (UCLA) argues for the emergence of enhanced cognitive abilities …as a driving force behind human behavioral evolution. The author reviews the diversity of social systems among Old World monkeys and chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, in an attempt to establish the foundations of human social organization. The book leads readers from an appreciation of the complexities of monkey and ape societies to an understanding of the sophistication of modern human communities; this transition is accompanied by an organizational shift from biological kin selection to cultural group selection. In sum, a provocative book with tantalizing ideas,…” Choice, R.A.Delgado Jr. , University of Southern California
Abstract
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.
- C. C. Kolb, National Endowment for the Humanities in CHOICE
"This important contribution summarises a lifetime involvement with teaching, developing and debating approaches to artifact classifi cation. Dwight Read brings to this task his own varied contributions and highly-developed logical and mathematical skills. It is a valuable study of some key issues in and approaches to archaeological practice."
- David Frankel, Australian Archaeology
Human social organizations are created by people using systems of ideas with very specific logical properties. This book describes what these idea-systems are with an unbroken chain of analysis that begins with field elicitation and continues by working out their most fundamental, logico-mathematical generative elements. This enables us to see precisely how these idea systems are used to generate organizations that give pattern to ongoing behavior. The book shows how organizations are objectified by community members through symbolic representations that provide them with shared conceptions of organizations, roles, or relations that they see each other as participating in. The case for this constructive process being pan-Homo sapiens is described, spanning all human communities from the Upper Paleolithic to today, and from the most seemingly primitive Australian tribes to modern-day America and India. While focusing primarily on kinship, Human Thought and Social Organization shows how the analysis applies with equal precision to other social areas ranging from farming to political factionalism.
Review
“… Read and Leaf, in this highly stimulating book, present a novel, coherent theory about the co-evolution of human thought and language on the one hand, and human social organization on the other. They do so by shifting the perspective from cognitive development essentially happening within the human mind – to viewing it as driven by people's interactions with the outside material, environmental and social worlds. In doing so, they bring us a much more coherent and comprehensible history of human cognitive evolution than any I have seen thus far.”—
(Sander van der Leeuw Ph.D, Arizona State University )
This book by Murray Leaf and Dwight Read is both brilliant and revolutionary. It puts socio-cultural anthropology in a context that understands human social behavior as cognitively “governed,” i.e., not generated by ideas but rather made interpretable, and therefore interactive, by mental rules. These “rules” of conceptual government finally allow serious algebraic-mathematical analysis of social-cultural behavior and idea systems as formal science properly grounded in relevant technical philosophy in a genuine evolutionary framework.—
(F. K. Lehman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign )
We now know what terminologies are and why the efforts to analyze them have been so confused. There are distinct sets of terms, as anthropologists recognized, but that is not what is most important. What is most important are the ideas that make up the definitions of the terms. These are systematically interrelated and have a definite logical structure. We represent this by what we call a kinship map. Our method for eliciting it is an adaptation of frame analysis that has long been used in linguistics and other fields. This is an experimental method, in exactly the same sense the methods of biology or chemistry are experimental.
Second, we have a method for analyzing this logical structure, showing precisely what it is for any kinship map, and to a large extent also why it is this and not something else. We represent this logical structure by the kin term map, in contrast to the kinship map. The method for eliciting the kinship map was developed by Murray Leaf. The method for exposing and analyzing the kin term map was developed by Dwight Read.
their cultural meaning, the rights and obligations of kin, including expected (through not always realized) mutually supportive behavior by kin. The system of kin-term relations provides a kinship framework within which individuals formulate how they interact with their kin and a basis for interpreting the meaning and implications of the behavior of their kin to them. The kinship framework may also involve a culturally formulated ideology regarding the role and nature of the respective contribution of male and of a female to the formation of an offspring and to its emotional and mental make-up. Despite a biological mode of reproduction being a constant for all humans, local ideologies and accounts of reproduction vary extensively across human societies; hence these idea systems cannot simply be reduced to epiphenomena of biological reproduction. A group’s ideas about procreation, along with its ideas about kinship relations in general, provide for the social identity of a newborn offspring through the
family social unit (ranging in form from single parent to extended family) into which it is born and to its position in an already existing network of kinship relations into which it is entering through kinship relations recognized at birth. Kinship relations also provide an idiom through which forms of social organization are expressed in human societies—especially in pre-state societies—whether the society is a small, hunter-gatherer group or a large, modern industrial state.
terms have been assumed to identify categories of genealogical relations (despite ethnographic evidence to the contrary), and kinship terminologies are classified using differences in genealogical referents of kin terms. Recent analysis, however, by building on ethnographically validated procedures for computing kin relations from kin terms without reference to genealogy makes evident the underlying generative logic for the structure of kinship terminologies. Making the generative logic of terminologies explicit provides a more rigorous comparative basis for the study of kinship terminology systems.
English: Kinship relations are understood to incorporate both genealogical relations among individuals and kin term relations identified through the kin terms a speaker uses in reference to other individuals. The connection between procreation and kinship relations is ontologically multi-threaded, leading from patterned behavior at the phenomenal level to abstract terminological systems at the ideational level. Procreation, Paratio suggests, provides a common foundation for the construction of variable conceptual systems of kinship relations.
It was for his extensionist position on kinship terminologies—what he liked to call ‘systems of kin classification’—that he was best known. In a nutshell, Scheffler would come to raise two questions: (1) What is the primary meaning—what he called the focus—of kinship terms like English ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’ etc.? (2) By what procedures do people extend these meanings from their foci to others? His answers, based upon meticulous analyses of kinship terminologies in various parts of the world, were that focal membership is supplied mostly by nuclear family relationships, from which relationships it is extended to people even to things—outside the nuclear family; and that these extensions are accomplished by ordered sets of rules that have considerable generality cross-culturally.
problem.
language and kinship change in parallel. I find that this is not the case, so our understanding of kinship terminology structure cannot simply be subsumed under the study of linguistic structures as has been widely assumed. I conclude by comparing changes in the structural and linguistic aspects of the same terminologies so as to enrich our understanding of the factors influencing the development of kinship terminologies through time. This will increase our understanding of the time-based development of kinship systems.
constraint that limited technology, whereas, in the second part, this biological constraint seems to have been lifted and others have come in its place. But these are modifiable by means of conceptual frameworks that facilitate concept innovation and therefore enable learning, thereby permitting acceleration in the pace of change in technology. In the last part of the paper, we elaborate on some of the consequences of that acceleration.
We agree that a competitive advantage would arise from more flexible and more encompassing forms of social organization and have previously modeled its implications in detail for the replacement of one group by another under conditions of difference in modes of adaptation leading to substantial differences in population density or equivalently measured as changes in population size keeping the area fixed (Read 1987) -- conditions satisfied by population estimates around 4,400–5,900 for modern Homo sapiens in the European area for the time period of the Aurignacian (Bocquet-Appel et al. 2005) in contrast with estimates around 1,710 - 2,690 for Neanderthals (Richter 2008). Missing so far, though, are the reasons why the mode of adaptation leading to higher population densities was open to Upper Paleolithic humans and not to the Neanderthals. This lacuna is not resolved by imposing a definition, even in broad terms, of what constitutes so-called ‘modern behavior’ such as “behavior that is mediated by socially constructed patterns of symbolic thinking, actions, and communication that allow for material and information exchange and cultural continuity between and across generations and contemporaneous communities” (Henshilwood and Marean 2003: 635). Definitions like this neither provide us with understanding of how the claimed new forms of social organization would come about in the first place nor what are the cognitive requirements needed for their enactment. The missing evidence, we suggest, lies in considering what are the cognitive requisites of such behavior, the archaeological evidence for when they are in place and their possible evolutionary development. In so doing, we also construct a better understanding of what we mean by “modern behavior” and what it means to be human.
We do not intend to re-argue all of the issues involved. We are only adding a new interpretive reference point focusing on what may have enabled the changes that took place in the mode of social organization in the developing Homo sapiens lineage and was absent from the Neanderthal lineage and, we argue, seems to have provided the basis for what appears to be their competitive advantage vis-á-vis the Neanderthals (Shea 2003; Banks et al. 2008; Bar-Yosef 2009).
We first give examples of the kinds of abstractions, and the hierarchy of conceptual dimensions neces-sary for prehistoric human beings and their ancestors, to conquer matter, i.e. to conceptually understand, transmit and apply the operations needed to master the making of a range of objects made out of stone, bone, wood, clay and other materials. Some of the abstractions that had to be conceived in this domain resemble those that Read et al. refer to in the last chapter, while others apply to this domain alone, and had to be truly ‘invented’. It is then argued that such ‘identification of conceptual dimensions’ is a process that underlies all human activity, and we look a little closer at how that process relates to invention and innovation.
Lastly, we shift our attention to the role of innovation, information processing and communication in the emergence of social institutions, and in the structural transformation of human societies as they grow in size and complexity. In particular, we look at the role that problem solving and invention play in creating more and more complex societies, encompassing increasing numbers of people, more and more diverse institutions, and an – ultimately seemingly all-encompassing – appropriation of the natural environment. To illustrate this development we will focus on the origins and growth of urban systems.
in organizational structure and functionality, including the essential activities of recruitment, differentiation and coordination. Innovation in these organizations is accomplished through processes of organizational transformation, and to understand how these work, “organization thinking” rather than “population thinking” is required. The fundamental questions that organization thinking addresses include the following: What is social organization? How are particular social organizations constructed, maintained, and transformed? What kinds of functionality do social organizations support, and how do they create new functionality? In addressing these questions,
the chapter describes a bootstrapping dynamic, whereby organizations generate new functionality, which is instantiated in activities that in turn generate new organizations."
What changed, however, in the evolutionary pathway going from the nonhuman primates to our species was not simply the introduction of a new form of trait transmission but a fundamental transformation from behavior-driven social systems dependent upon face-to-face interaction as the means to work out social relations between individuals to the formation of relation-based systems of social organization (Read, 2012). This fundamentally changed the organizing properties of human social systems from their prior, primate, form of bottom-up systems with emergence of the source of properties occurring above the individual level, to top-down, culturally formulated systems of social organization that shifted the evolutionaryfocus from trait change at the individual level to change in systems of organization (Lane, Maxfield, Read, & van der Leeuw, 2009).
spatial similarity and cohesion of artifact types. This method can handle heterogeneous data and is able to reveal and deconstruct overlapping areas into their constituent elements. Application to a Mousterian habitation site from the Levant as a case study enables us to distinguish three spatially cohesive yet overlapping sets ("tool kits") of artifact and ecofact types within the boundaries of an excavated 50 square meter sub-area of the site.
evolution through mutation, inheritance, and natural selection,
the expanded synthesis has focused on endogenous processes
affecting the development and expression of traits, not
just their selection as optimal solutions to externally imposed
change. The authors suggest that accounts of cultural evolution
should focus similarly on endogenous processes relating
to the development and formation of cultural phenomena.
The goal is laudable; the means proposed for doing so are
incomplete.
more richly detailed account of symbolic systems than is assumed by the authors. Cultural systems are not simply the equivalent in the ideational domain of culture of the purported Baldwin Effect in the genetic domain.
hypothesized origins of sexual aversion and incest taboos and
use existing ethnography to assert that “cousin marriage
among the Karo of Indonesia . . . reveal[s] Westermarckian
patterns” (2011:443). The Karo are patrilineal Batak from
North Sumatra practicing clan exogamy with marriage between
matrilateral cross cousins (known as impal) valued for
maintaining proper kinship relationships (Singarimbun
1975). Impal marriages are reported to be rare (Singarimbun
1975). The authors claim that “impal have a stated aversion
to intermarriage . . . consistent with the Westermarck hypothesis,” with the provision that “impal are cosocialized”
since “early life association leads [marriageable cousins] to
erroneously view one another as siblings” (2011:443).
There are several problems with this study. First, the evidence
for the supposedWestermarckian aversion is equivocal.
Second, no evidence is demonstrated for a persistent or transmitted folk model of aversion. Third, there is no evidence of
a link between the presumed folk model and frequency of
cross-cousin marriages. Each problem is considered in turn.
have had with developing a unifying
theory about cultural systems, their relationship
to human behaviour, and how they change
through time stems from the complexity of
modelling self-modifying systems, not from
failure to embed the enterprise in a Darwinian
evolutionary framework as argued by Mesoudi
et al.
From the Preface of the book:
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization ... begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems .... It is the functionality of systems of organization ... that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. ... More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. ... culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems ... encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.
Expert System), which recasts the analysis of Bisayan address terms by Geoghegan into an expert system. The expert system was used both to examine the logic of Geoghegan 's argument and to formulate an alternative modelfor linking an address term with addressee. Expert systems, we suggest, may provide a method for examining rigorously what otherwise are more loosely stated, verbal arguments. [folk knowledge, expert systems, cognition, computers, culture]"
relates the properties and structure of kinship terminologies to an underlying logic that the KAES program helps uncover and model as a generative structure. The program then relates the
structural logic of a kinship terminology modeled by the KAES program to a genealogical space based on genealogical tracing of kin relations. The KAES program demonstrates the surprisingly logical character of kinship terminologies and challenges the received viewof the primacy of genealogical relations in defining cultural kinship through showing how genealogical definitions of kin terms can be accurately predicted in the terminologies considered to date.
intellect of man and monkeys is the lack of the ability of the latter to think recursively, that
is, to apply logical operations to the results of previous similar logical operations. The
inability to recursion is due to the small capacity of the “working memory”, which in
monkeys cannot simultaneously accommodate more than two or three concepts (in
humans - up to seven).