Exploring the Psychological basis for Transitions in the Archaeological Record
Bibliographic record
Abstract
No other species remotely approaches the human capacity for the cultural evolution of novelty that is accumulative, adaptive, and open-ended (i.e., with no a priori limit on the size or scope of possibilities). This chapter synthesizes research from anthropology, psychology, archaeology, genetics, and agent-based models into a speculative yet coherent account of two fundamental cognitive transitions underlying human cultural evolution that is consistent with contemporary psychology. The ideas in this chapter grew out of a non-Darwinian framework for cultural evolution referred to as the Self-Other Reorganization (SOR), according to which culture evolves (as did early life) through communal exchange among self-organizing neural networks. SOR bridges psychological research on fundamental aspects of our human nature such as creativity and our proclivity to reflect on ideas from different perspectives, with the literature on evolutionary approaches to cultural evolution. The current chapter grounds the SOR theory of cultural evolution in terms of cognitive transitions as suggested by archaeological evidence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".