The objectivity of moral norms is a top-down cultural construct.

Encultured individuals see the behavioral rules of cultural systems of moral norms as objective. In addition to prescriptive regulation of behavior, moral norms provide templates, scripts, and scenarios regulating the expression of feelings and triggered emotions arising from perceptions of norm violation. These allow regulated defensive responses that may arise as moral idea systems co-opt emotionally associated biological survival instincts.

What Are Group Level Traits and How Do They Evolve?

Cultural traits are seldom atomic, are distributed over multiple social domains, and undergo differential selection. This makes it important to study the nature and evolution of these traits from a global viewpoint. This paper considers group level cultural traits-what sort of traits are there, how do they evolve, and what is the relationship between cultural traits and their representation in individual worldviews. While not providing a concise theory, important aspects of cultural traits are elaborated and directions of further research indicated. Group level traits arising from individual biological traits are distinguished from those that are intrinsic to a group. The latter are formative of individual worldviews and are emotionally salient for group members. Children are saturated with culture from birth, it provides the scaffolding for their developing worldviews. Affective links between cultural ideas, social behavior, and material elements of culture develop so that the affordances in perceived situations carry biases influencing behavior toward culturally acceptable responses. Intrinsic traits are not, however, acted on directly by group level selection; rather, this selection acts on the behavior of group members and only indirectly on intrinsic cultural ideas through social exchange processes between group members.

Simple graph models of information spread in finite populations.

We consider several classes of simple graphs as potential models for information diffusion in a structured population. These include biases cycles, dual circular flows, partial bipartite graphs and what we call 'single-link' graphs. In addition to fixation probabilities, we study structure parameters for these graphs, including eigenvalues of the Laplacian, conductances, communicability and expected hitting times. In several cases, values of these parameters are related, most strongly so for partial bipartite graphs. A measure of directional bias in cycles and circular flows arises from the non-zero eigenvalues of the antisymmetric part of the Laplacian and another measure is found for cycles as the value of the transition probability for which hitting times going in either direction of the cycle are equal. A generalization of circular flow graphs is used to illustrate the possibility of tuning edge weights to match pre-specified values for graph parameters; in particular, we show that generalizations of circular flows can be tuned to have fixation probabilities equal to the Moran probability for a complete graph by tuning vertex temperature profiles. Finally, single-link graphs are introduced as an example of a graph involving a bottleneck in the connection between two components and these are compared to the partial bipartite graphs.