Open Directory - Science: Social Sciences: Cognitive Science: Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
See also: - Short annotated bibliography and link list related to theories of the global brain. "Society can be viewed as a multicellular organism, with individuals in the role of the cells. The network of communication channels connecting individuals then plays the role of a nervous system for this superorganism, i.e. a "global brain"." - Extensive site containing sections on evolution, "memory expansion" and brain research news. - Research tool for exploring the relevance of the study of human cognition to communication and the arts. Features articles, discourse and bibliography. - Writings applying cognitive science to the study of literature and composition, including chapters from a book. Also includes links to other relevant material. - A scholarly journal dedicated to the exploration, criticism, and development of René Girard's mimetic model of the relationship between violence and religion in the genesis and maintenance of culture. - Publications on cognition, artificial intelligence, robotics and information processing in the human brain. - Paper on the engineering of highly complex large aggregates of intelligence-based systems in the real world environment. - The central hypothesis in this paper is that there were three major cognitive transformations by which the modern human mind emerged over several million years: 1) mimetic skill and autocueing, 2) lexical invention, 3) externalization of memory. - Site has three sections: the first is concerned with the evolution of the human capacity to construct signs; the second deals with Cultural-Historical Psychology; the third concerns theories and arguments about the evolution of brain, consciousness, language, and sociality. - "The evolution of ethical systems is described in scientific terms using cybernetics as its logical foundation. A plausible theory of the integration of science and ethics." Online book - Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that the specific mechanism by which humans mastered the Pleistocene is our capacity to evolve adaptations to the variation of Plio-Pleistocene environments via cultural traditions. - Essays and weblog entries on various topics regarding human nature. - Chapter from Prof. Gary Cziko's book "Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution." XML Feeds: - A web resource for those interested in evolution, cognition, synthetic life, artificial intelligence and general science that improves the human condition. [RSS]
