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Take a global tour of childhood that spans 50 countries and explore everyday questions such as 'Why does love matter?', 'How do children learn right from wrong'? and 'Why do adolescent relationships feel like a matter of life and death?' Combining psychology, anthropology, and evolution, you will learn about topics such as language, morality, empathy, creativity, learning and cooperation. Discover how children's skills develop, how they adapt to solve challenges, and what makes you, you. Divided into three chronological sections – early years, middle childhood, and adolescence – this book is enriched with a full set of pedagogical features, including key points to help you retain the main takeaway of each section, space for recap, a glossary of key terms, learning outcomes and chapter summaries. Embedded videos and animations throughout bring ideas to life and explain the methods researchers use to reveal the secrets of child development.
Little attention has been paid to competitive dynamics from a political perspective, despite numerous instances of political competition across cultures and systems. In liberal democratic societies, political competition is legalized, allowing citizens to elect leaders who represent their ideas. Conversely, in totalitarian societies, citizens lack voting rights, and political authority is not challenged through democratic means. However, political competitions still occur among ruling elites, often through purges to seize power. This chapter explores political competition, particularly in totalitarian regimes, where purges eliminate rivals among ruling elites. The collapse of such regimes has marked an evolution toward freedom and equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of background, which aligns with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Highlighting the lack of research on political competitions from an evolutionary psychology perspective, this chapter underscores the need for future research on human emotions and competitive behaviors in the political arena.
Chapter 3 explores open quantum systems, emphasizing their interactions with environments, unlike isolated closed systems. It introduces the concept of generalized measurements and mixed quantum states, reflecting the complex scenarios arising from these interactions. The chapter utilizes Positive Operator Valued Measures (POVMs) to describe generalized measurements, broadening the conventional approach to quantum measurements.
A significant focus is on the evolution of open systems through quantum channels, which illustrate the transfer or transformation of quantum information amid noise and external disturbances. This section underpins the dynamics open systems exhibit, critical for understanding quantum computing and information processing in realistic settings.
Through practical examples, the chapter elucidates how environmental factors influence quantum information, vital for applications in quantum technologies. It aims to equip readers with foundational knowledge of open quantum systems, highlighting their importance in the broader context of quantum mechanics.
Chapter 11 deals with the timescale of history and human evolution. It offers a complexity approach to the evolution of art that attempts to move beyond simplistic theories of the survival function of art, including the much-debated issue of the function of art in the context of sexual selection. After discussing the basic principles of evolution from a complex systems approach, the chapter outlines different evolutionary scenarios: the survival-enhancing function, on the one hand, and the view of art as an evolutionary by-product, on the other. By showing how both evolution and human activity are entangled, interaction-dominated dynamics, the chapter provides an alternative to simplistic gene-for-art assumptions.
This book presents a comprehensive and unexpected approach to the visual arts, grounded in the theories of complexity and dynamical systems. Paul van Geert shows how complexity and dynamical systems theories, originally developed in mathematics and physics, offer a novel perspective through which to view the visual arts. Diverse aspects of visual arts as a practice, profession, and historical framework are covered. A key focus lies in the unique characteristics of complex systems: feedback loops bridging short- to long-term temporal scales, self-organizing into creative emergent properties; dynamics which may be applied to a wide range of topics. By synthesizing theory and empirical evidence from diverse fields including philosophy, psychology, sociology, art history, and economics, this pioneering work demonstrates the utility of simulation models in deciphering a surprisingly wide range of phenomena such as artistic (super)stardom and shifts within art historical paradigms.
This Element explores the relevance of non-human animals to theology. It suggests that while Christian theology has so far been a thoroughly anthropocentric discipline, there are good reasons for treating animals as subjects worthy of theological reflection in their own right. The Element considers animals in the context of Christian ethics, investigates whether the violence and suffering found in evolutionary processes can be reconciled with a good God, and surveys some of the ways key theological doctrines may need to be altered in the light of what contemporary science teaches about human animals and non-humans.
This article reports from an interdisciplinary, archaeological and philosophical research project developing and using an analogue model in archaeological research. With prominent uses outside of archaeology, analogue models can offer a unique participatory perspective to prehistoric processes. As such the paper contributes to recent discussions in this journal and elsewhere on the role of games, play and gamification in archaeological research, teaching and cultural heritage. Our analogue model critically discusses cultural-evolution-based models of selected European Neolithic and Bronze Age models and develops a perspective based on the life history and the Capability Approaches. In times of climate and war stress, our model can offer a hopeful perspective of the human past, present and future without compromising on scientific insights.
Recently, there has been a Renaissance for multi-level selection models to explain the persistence of unselfish behavior in social dilemmas, in which assortative/correlated matching plays an important role. In the current study of a multi-round prisoners’ dilemma experiment, we introduce two correlated matching procedures that match subjects with similar action histories together. We discover significant treatment effects, compared to the control procedure of random matching. Particularly with the weighted history matching procedure we find bifurcations regarding group outcomes. Some groups converge to the all-defection equilibrium even more pronouncedly than the control groups do, while other groups generate much higher rate of cooperation, which is also associated with higher relative reward for a typical cooperative action. All in all, the data show that cooperation does have a much better chance to persist in a correlated/assortative-matching environment, as predicted in the literature.
We recall the life and work of Timothy J. Crow, whose contributions provided great insights into the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and continue to shape many questions in the field. We compile his key works relating to psychotic disorders, focusing on the trajectory of his theoretical stance. Our account is interlaced with our own interpretation of the evidence that influenced Crow’s arguments over the years as well as his scientific method. Crow has had a significant impact on the neuroscience of schizophrenia. Many of his observations are still valid and several questions he raised remain unanswered to date.
This chapter of the handbook examines the complex relation between empathy and prosociality by drawing on evolutionary theory, neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics. The author begins by distinguishing three components of the broader phenomenon of empathy: emotional contagion, empathic concern, and perspective taking. He reviews evidence suggesting that emotional contagion of a conspecific’s pain often leads to helping behavior, but such contagion is modulated by group membership, levels of intimacy, and attitudes toward the other. Empathic concern, too, is a powerful motivator of prosocial behaviors but is also socially modulated – extended to some people more than others and to individuals more than groups. Effortful perspective taking, finally, can provide a better understanding of other people’s minds but does not always generate prosocial behavior, even when it facilitates empathic concern. In sum, various forms of empathy can motivate prosocial behaviors, but empathy is fragile and often stops short of its potential when people engage with large groups, people outside of their tribe, or anonymous strangers.
This chapter of the handbook proposes a developmental ethics, an organic moral theory grounded in (1) humanity’s deep evolutionary history, (2) the malleability of the child’s neurobiological structures that undergird moral functioning, and (3) the influence of cultural practices on neurobiological development. The chapter addresses the following questions: What kind of creature are we? What qualities do we need to live a full life? What kinds of capacities make each a proper member of the species? What influences our development? Answers center around perhaps the most critical influence on human development, our species’ evolved nest. In humanity’s ancestral context, nestedness is a lifelong experience with particular import in early life. Moral virtue emerges from holistically coordinated physiological, psychological, spiritual systems oriented toward holistic communal harmony, social attunement, receptivity, and interpersonal flexibility. Understanding how the evolved nest scaffolds biopsychosocial and moral development reveals why antisocial behavior is so pervasive in modern Western culture – and it provides a baseline for redesigning society to promote prosociality.
My biographical sketch describes how I became a cultural/cross-cultural developmental scientist as a complete autodidact. During the late 1960s in Germany universities were in a massive process of change which only later resulted in formal institutional structures and curricula. Until then, there was complete freedom for pursuing interests and selecting topics. I was generally interested in other cultures and found opportunities to study children and families abroad. Connecting with evolutionary theory prompted me towards being a universalist. In another direction, meeting great minds in the fields of cultural and cross-cultural psychology helped me find my point of view as a developmental scientist studying children’s developmental pathways in different cultural environments. Together with wonderful colleagues, I studied systematic contextual variations in solving general developmental tasks. My overall conclusion is that culture needs to be consistently introduced into developmental science and all its applications (in policy and practical interventions).
Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this book explores three interconnected aspects of syntax - its origins and evolution, its acquisition by children, and its role in languages' ongoing development and change. These three distinct areas were linked through Bickerton's most provocative work 'Language Bioprogram Hypothesis' (LBH). This book highlights the discussions on syntax that have emerged over the years as a result of the LBH model. Each chapter include a discussion of Bickerton's work, and a special focus is placed on Creole languages, which provide unique case studies for the study of the evolution, acquisition and development of languages. The book also discusses the relevance of LBH for other natural languages, including sign languages. Shedding light on the relevance of syntax in language, it is essential reading for researchers and students in a wide range of linguistic disciplines.
In recent years we have come to understand better the forces that have shaped biological evolution over the course of time. Evolved purposiveness (teleonomy) in living systems themselves has been an important influence. Cooperative effects (synergies) of various kinds have also been influential. And the bioeconomics (functional costs and benefits) have been important constraints. Now we are facing a mounting survival crisis that may determine the future of life on Earth. We need to make a major course change, utilizing our insights into these important influences. Here is a review, and a 'prescription.'
Scholars of international relations (IR) and evolution pay little attention to each other's fields. However, there is a need to examine evolution's impacts in IR. International actors such as nations are made up of people, so evolved human nature has an impact on relations within and between states. Accordingly, this pathbreaking Element will attempt to apply insights from evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and archaeogenetics to IR. Among such insights are the evolved role of emotions in decision-making, intergroup competition as a driver of in-group cooperation, and culture, morality, and language as group-binding mechanisms. Homo sapiens is a primate, so comparison with the behaviours of other great apes reveals some commonalities in terms of group dynamics, status, and hierarchies, as well as the enduring human capacity for both in-group cooperation and organised violence against other groups. These have an evolutionary basis that is relevant to IR theory and practice.
Chapter 6 returns to H. G. Wells to offer a fuller account of this writer’s longstanding fascination with animal experimentation, a practice he supported. Analysis of The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), short stories, and essays reveal this author’s investment in contemporary scientific debates surrounding the thorny issues surrounding non-human pain introduced in Chapter 5. Despite differences in genre and tone, the selected texts each exploit the uneasy relationship between injury, experience, and expression to raise compelling questions about pain’s purpose and limits. The period’s vivisection debates were an important and productive context for Wells who capitalised on the ambivalence they produced, undermined the generic expectations of writings about the subject, and considered whether literary and linguistic methods could uniquely capture – or even solve – the problem of pain.
Various cognitive theories indicate how the brain and technology have interacted with each other in an iterative and progressive manner to shape human cognition. Technologies are cultural tools that emerged as a human response to address specific needs. These technologies have allowed us to overcome various ecological, social, and cultural challenges that have impacted the phylogenetic development of higher cognitive abilities that have elevated Homo sapiens above other species. In the digital age, technologies such as the internet, smartphones, and the various software applications that derive from them play a fundamental role in how we relate to ourselves and society. Understanding how humans interact with these technologies, and the effect they have on altering brain architecture, is essential for designing and developing better tools. This chapter summarizes the key findings that explain the consequences of using these technologies on our development and how behavior, through these means, has given rise to digital behavior. Digital behavior is the compendium of interactions and their consequences that occur on the individual when using a digital service. The design of digital behaviors can be described as a new sub-field of Human Factors and Engineering Psychology, with habit formation and need satisfaction serving as the main epistemological core of digital behavior design. The design of digital behaviors is a necessary discipline that can enhance user engagement with these technologies by improving cognitive ergonomics, thereby more effectively addressing the needs that users bring to these types of services.
Time is ripe to complement the question 'what is health and disease?' in philosophy of medicine with a 'philosophy of physiology.' Indeed, the actors in this debate share the conviction that a 'foundational' concept dictates to this scientific field what is to be considered healthy or pathological and leaves it to explore only facts and mechanisms. Rejecting this presupposition, philosophy of physiology accepts that biomedical sciences explore and redefine their own object: the healthy, the pathological. Indeed, various theories of disease and health, that philosophers have rarely studied, form the core of biomedical research, too hastily considered as a science 'without theories.' The Element identifies them, and clarifies their content, presuppositions, and scope. Finally, it proposes a new question about the unity of the pathological phenomenon: not 'what do all diseases have in common?' but rather, 'why is the susceptibility to disease a universal and necessary characteristic of living beings?'
Samuel Butler sharply divides critics, some seeing him as a relativist and thus a precursor of modernism, others as a purveyor of outdated scientific and philosophical dogma. This essay situates him as a transitional figure, straddling modern and Victorian paradigms in the tradition of the novel of ideas. Butler’s relativistic tendencies emerge through distinctive formal techniques, his chief influence on the modern novel: enigmatic use of satire; rapid, dissonant tonal shifts; defamiliarization of commonplace ideas; and fierce iconoclasm – techniques that fuel his radical questioning both of rationality and of ideas themselves. But Butler also affirmed common sense, instinct, and faith – in opposition to rationality – by conceiving them in Lamarckian evolutionary terms: that is, as repositories of intellectual choices made over the course of millennia and preserved in collective unconscious memory. Butler thus believed that ideas always fall short of truth, even as they facilitate an open-ended, interminable progress toward it.
Through the outline of a coherent theoretical foundation for understanding East Asian international relations, this textbook offers a fresh, analytical approach, including applications of evolutionary theory that differ from and contextualize the prevailing theories currently offered for studies of East Asia. It provides an extensive coverage of ancient world order and European imperialism preceding contemporary themes of security, economic development, money and finance, regionalism, the US-China rivalry, and democracy versus autocracy. Demonstrating systemically how facts and theories are constructed, and how these are bound by evolutionary constraints, students gain a realistic view of knowledge production and the mindset and tools to participate actively in determining which facts and theories are more acceptable than alternatives. Feature boxes, discussion questions, exercises, and recommended readings are incorporated into each chapter to encourage active learning. A vital new resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in political science, international relations, and Asian studies.