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.

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.

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.