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Discuss The Evolutionary Importance Of Culture As A Hominid Adaptation

Essay Instructions:

The significance of culture cannot be overstated, but neither can it be assumed.  Constructing a good answer to this question requires addressing the adaptive significance of culture. That is, you need to identify the selective pressures in favor of culture and discuss how being culture increased the selective fitness of early hominids.

The first issue to address is the brain.  Increased cognitive abilities underlie the capacity for culture.  What trends exist in brain size within the hominid line?  You also need to within the hominid line?  You also need to specify why having a bigger brain paid off.  Brains are expensive to operate and unless the big brain helps you to get more food, it doesn’t make sense.

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Discuss the evolutionary importance of culture as a hominid adaptation
In the early centuries, humans existed in many parts of the worlds; however, surviving in these areas was diverse and depended not on specific adaptations including, cultural abilities and skills (Cartwright 56). Scholars have recognized the importance of culture in human life leading to different theories of explaining the importance of culture in hominine adaptation. For a long time, human behavior is perceived to be the product of the evolution of human from biology and culture perspectives (Cartwright 61).
Biologist attempt to explain the relationship between neo-Darwinian theory of evolution and cultural significance as the result of natural selection (Gangestad and Simpson 121). They believe that human biological and cultural attributes are mostly affected by the selective retention of traits that promote inclusive fitness of an individual in their environment. Species can learn from others that affecting some aspects of his behavior, cultural evolutionary processes arise, but the process can alter the environment faced by natural selection acting on genetic material(Gangestad and Simpson 124). Culture helps us understand how our cognitive processes for cultural learning can result to some of the social phenomena like castes and social classes and honor (Cartwright 69).
Culture explains how people acquire standards by which they judge others. Cultural evolution can sustain almost any behavior of a population. Culture helps us understand the natural learning that suggests that humans are programmed to attend to signal that facilitate (Cartwright 66). Neuroeconomic studies reveal that social norms are internalized as inherent motivation within our Brian .the idea of cultural brain hypothesis has been analyzed by several researchers (Gangestad and Simpson 135). When culture and the brain interact, we can learn the most important selection pressure over the course of human evolution, especially in understanding things that are created by culture like tools (Ko 22). Unlike chimpanzee, humans have a high level of acquiring skills to perform the task using their hands. There are aspects of the human brain that is consistent with the innate ability are the product of Cultural Revolution (Ko 29).
One of the most divergent features of human evolution is the increase in the brain over the Plio-Pleistocene. Many authors have argued that the beginning of Pleistocene climate fluctuation has been the cause of the evolution of human composition and cognition (Cartwright 78). Early hominid had a large brain than that of ape's .With time the size of the brain has been divided into many parts. Brains have become expensive to maintain the increase in the early homo brain was estimated to...
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