Lauren McCall's paper on Cultural Evolution


NESCent post-doc Lauren McCall has a new paper in Evolution: Education and Outreach in which she addresses the questions: Does cultural diversification simulate a natural experiment in cultural group-level evolution? Or is cultural diversity simply the result of human behavioral flexibility? Comparing 97 indigenous language communities from around the world, I find that while the non-neutral geographic variation of a few cultural traits can be explained with the evolutionary reasoning of "soft group selection"(Mayr 1997), many cultural traits are proportionately dispersed and do not violate the expectation of neutral biogeography."


McCall, L. 2009. Studying Cultural Evolution at the Tips: Human Cross-cultural Ecology Evolution: Education and Outreach, Vol 2(1):1936-6426 10.1007/s12052-008-0067-2

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