Mesoudi et al/Towards a unified science of cultural evolution: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, ================================================================== *** IMPORTANT INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Mesoudi-020… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. NOTE: Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ** Please respond to this Call no later than December 5, 2005 ** ================================================================== CALL FOR COMMENTATORS ================================================================== Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article "Towards a unified science of cultural evolution" by Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten, and Kevin N. Laland This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Please DO NOT prepare a commentary unless you eventually receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. ======================================================================= *** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION *** ======================================================================= TITLE: Towards a unified science of cultural evolution AUTHORS: Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten, and Kevin N. Laland ABSTRACT: We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal sub-disciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology and biogeography, while mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in ‘social cognitive neuroscience’, although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences. KEYWORDS: Cultural Anthropology; Cultural Evolution; Cultural Transmission; Culture; Evolution; Evolutionary Archaeology; Evolutionary Biology; Gene-Culture Coevolution; Memes; Social Learning FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Mesoudi-02092005/Referees/ ================================================================== *** IMPORTANT INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Mesoudi-020… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. NOTE: Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ** Please respond to this Call no later than December 5, 2005 ** ================================================================== ================================================================== Barbara Finlay - Editor Paul Bloom - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------