Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter examines the status of a theory of brain-culture coevolution derived largely from evidence within cognitive science. The theory employed archeological evidence to estimate the time and order of adaptative change. It proposed that the emergence of the human mind took place in three stages, each highly social and interactive, culminating in a novel multi-level memory system distributed across many brains, instead of restricted to a single brain. In the first stage, this cognitive-cultural system stored and transmitted procedural memories, mostly in the form of embodied skills. The system gradually expanded its reach to encompass various kinds of abstract and symbolic knowledge in later stages. While the basics of that theory are still in force, material culture has been strongly confirmed as a factor driving both brain and cognitive evolution in the later stages. Complex material culture, and the unpredictable “cognitive ecology” that it creates, placed brain plasticity and semantic memory under strong selection pressure well over a million years ago, and is still playing an active role in the realization of the genetic potential of the brain. As language and literacy have evolved, a minority “theoretic culture” has emerged in recent millennia, assuming top governance in human cognitive affairs. There is a real possibility that humanity is entering into a fourth cognitive transition period, driven by communication technology; this is briefly considered.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.003 |
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".