Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id NAA29766 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 10 Jan 2001 13:43:34 GMT User-Agent: Microsoft Outlook Express Macintosh Edition - 5.0 (1513) Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 08:40:00 -0500 Subject: Re: DNA Culture .... Trivia? From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> CC: Janet Hays <JAHNYC@compuserve.com> Message-ID: <B681C02F.67B6%bbenzon@mindspring.com> In-Reply-To: <A4400389479FD3118C9400508B0FF230010D19FF@DELTA.newhouse.akzonobel.nl> Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
on 1/10/01 3:47 AM, Gatherer, D. (Derek) at
D.Gatherer@organon.nhe.akzonobel.nl wrote:
>
> I ran all these vectors through a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM) using
> various sizes and conformations of map. Then I examined the resulting
> clustered and topographically arranged data to see if there was anything
> striking in them. There was. Agricultural societies tend to be more
> monotheistic than societies relying on other food production methods. This
> is true across all continents. The correlation between percentage
> dependence on agriculture and monotheism is about 0.65. The average
> dependence on agriculture in a polytheistic society is under 40%. In
> monotheistic societies it's over 70%. This difference is statistically
> significant at p < 0.001
>
> Now I don't pretend to know why this is the case. I leave easy just-so
> stories to the neural brigade. But the facts remain: agriculture and
> monotheism are both cultural phenomena, and they are associated. That's
> empirical memetics, and there isn't a neural meme in sight.
Derek: This result is well-known among those who do empirical work on
cultural complexity. If you want to continue along these lines Derek you
should get:
David G. Hays, The Measurement of Cultural Evolution in the Non-Literature
World, Metagram Press, 1994, 1997.
This is a review and synthesis of three decades of work on cultural
complexity. It's available at Amazon.com. You can check out the Metagram
website at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jahnyc
You should also take a look at Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture,
Transaction Press: 1994.
This is a massive cross-cultural study of song style, producing correlations
between measures of cultural complexity and features of song style, etc.
In general, there's a whole world of empirical work based on outgrowths of
Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas. Do a web search on HRAF (Human Relations Area
Files). This work has been going on for years.
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