The trouble with memes : Inference versus imitation in cultural creation.

Memes are hypothetical cultural units passed on by imitation; although nonbiological, they undergo Darwinian selection like genes. Cognitive study of multimodular human minds undermines memetics: unlike in genetic replication, high-fidelity transmission of cultural information is the exception, not the rule. Constant, rapid "mutation" of information during communication generates endlessly varied creations that nevertheless adhere to modular input conditions. The sort of cultural information most susceptible to modular processing is that most readily acquired by children, most easily transmitted across individuals, most apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration.

Folkecology and commons management in the Maya Lowlands.

Three groups living off the same rainforest habitat manifest strikingly distinct behaviors, cognitions, and social relationships relative to the forest. Only the area's last native Maya reveal systematic awareness of ecological complexity involving animals, plants, and people and practices clearly favoring forest regeneration. Spanish-speaking immigrants prove closer to native Maya in thought, action, and social networking than do immigrant Maya. There is no overriding "local," "Indian," or "immigrant" relationship to the environment. Results indicate that exclusive concern with rational self-interest and institutional constraints do not sufficiently account for commons behavior and that cultural patterning of cognition and access to relevant information are significant predictors. Unlike traditional accounts of relations between culture, cognition, and behavior, the models offered are not synthetic interpretations of people's thoughts and behaviors but are emergent cultural patterns derived statistically from measurements of individual cognitions and behaviors.

Folk biology and the anthropology of science: cognitive universals and cultural particulars.

This essay in the "anthropology of science" is about how cognition constrains culture in producing science. The example is folk biology, whose cultural recurrence issues from the very same domain-specific cognitive universals that provide the historical backbone of systematic biology. Humans everywhere think about plants and animals in highly structured ways. People have similar folk-biological taxonomies composed of essence-based, species-like groups and the ranking of species into lower- and higher-order groups. Such taxonomies are not as arbitrary in structure and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the assembly of entities into cosmologies, materials, or social groups. These structures are routine products of our "habits of mind," which may in part be naturally selected to grasp relevant and recurrent "habits of the world." An experiment illustrates that the same taxonomic rank is preferred for making biological inferences in two diverse populations: Lowland Maya and Midwest Americans. These findings cannot be explained by domain-general models of similarity because such models cannot account for why both cultures prefer species-like groups, although Americans have relatively little actual knowledge or experience at this level. This supports a modular view of folk biology as a core domain of human knowledge and as a special player, or "core meme," in the selection processes by which cultures evolve. Structural aspects of folk taxonomy provide people in different cultures with the built-in constraints and flexibility that allow them to understand and respond appropriately to different cultural and ecological settings. Another set of reasoning experiments shows that Maya, American folk, and scientists use similarly structured taxonomies in somewhat different ways to extend their understanding of the world in the face of uncertainty. Although folk and scientific taxonomies diverge historically, they continue to interact. The theory of evolution may ultimately dispense with the core concepts of folk biology, including species, taxonomy, and teleology; in practice, however, these may remain indispensable to doing scientific work. Moreover, theory-driven scientific knowledge cannot simply replace folk knowledge in everyday life. Folk-biological knowledge is not driven by implicit or inchoate theories of the sort science aims to make more accurate and perfect.

Categorization and reasoning among tree experts: do all roads lead to Rome?

To what degree do conceptual systems reflect universal patterns of featural covariation in the world (similarity) or universal organizing principles of mind, and to what degree do they reflect specific goals, theories, and beliefs of the categorizer? This question was addressed in experiments concerned with categorization and reasoning among different types of tree experts (e.g., taxonomists, landscape workers, parks maintenance personnel). The results show an intriguing pattern of similarities and differences. Differences in sorting between taxonomists and maintenance workers reflect differences in weighting of morphological features. Landscape workers, in contrast, sort trees into goal-derived categories based on utilitarian concerns. These sorting patterns carry over into category-based reasoning for the taxonomists and maintenance personnel but not the landscape workers. These generalizations interact with taxonomic rank and suggest that the genus (or folk generic) level is relatively and in some cases absolutely privileged. Implications of these findings for theories of categorization are discussed.