Objective Human culture is cumulative, which means that beliefs, art, technology, society etc. are results of many generations of cultural change. In light of biological evolution, the rise of human culture is very rapid and so is the cultural adaptation to new environments. How this happened offers a scientific puzzle. The capacity for cumulative culture gives mankind a unique potential to change and improve life, but culture can also impoverish and even ruin human existence. Thus, understanding the dynamics of culture is of the utmost importance.Unfortunately, cultural research has been hampered by insularity of disciplines and lack of unifying well-defined key concepts and valid mathematical models. This proposal brings together scientists with different backgrounds in a joint research effort to gain scientific understanding of the origin and dynamics of human cumulative culture. Such understanding would allow us to obtain a more integrated view of human history but also to make informed decisions concerning the future. We will take a modern evolutionary approach, combining novel and innovative theoretical and empirical research.We ask a number of specific questions about the origins, dynamics, and outcomes of cumulative culture. Since mathematical theory of cumulative cultural evolution is lacking, we will use state-of-the-art mathematics to develop a series of methods for modeling cumulative cultural evolution. These models will be applied to our questions. Empirical research aims at exploring our questions and test specific theoretical predictions. Such studies include archaeological and historical investigations of the cultural evolution of food habits and the evolution of beliefs, moral codes and laws, as well as studies of animal cultural capacities, and laboratory experiments on human cumulative culture. Fields of science social scienceslawnatural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsmathematical model Keywords adaptation beliefs cultural dynamics cultural evolution cumulative culture ecological sustainability food habits maladaptation multi-level models social learning Programme(s) FP6-POLICIES - Policy support: Specific activities covering wider field of research under the Focusing and Integrating Community Research programme 2002-2006. Topic(s) NEST-2005-Path-CUL - Cultural dynamics Call for proposal FP6-2005-NEST-PATH See other projects for this call Funding Scheme STREP - Specific Targeted Research Project Coordinator STOCKHOLMS UNIVERSITET Address Universitetsvaegen 10 Stockholm Sweden See on map Links Website Opens in new window EU contribution € 0,00 Participants (3) Sort alphabetically Sort by EU Contribution Expand all Collapse all MÄLARDALEN UNIVERSITY Sweden EU contribution € 0,00 Address Högskoleplan 1 Västerås See on map Links Website Opens in new window THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS United Kingdom EU contribution € 0,00 Address College gate, north street St andrews See on map Links Website Opens in new window UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA Italy EU contribution € 0,00 Address Via zamboni 33 Bologna See on map Links Website Opens in new window
