An evolutionary framework for cultural change: Selectionism versus communal exchange

Dawkins? replicator-based conception of evolution has led to widespread mis-application of selectionism across the social sciences because it does not address the paradox that necessitated the theory of natural selection in the first place: how do organisms accumulate change when traits acquired over their lifetime are obliterated? This is addressed by von Neumann?s concept of a self-replicating automaton (SRA). A SRA consists of a self-assembly code that is used in two distinct ways: (1) actively deciphered during development to construct a self-similar replicant, and (2) passively copied to the replicant to ensure that it can reproduce. Information that is acquired over a lifetime is not transmitted to offspring, whereas information that is inherited during copying is transmitted. In cultural evolution there is no mechanism for discarding acquired change. Acquired change can accumulate orders of magnitude faster than, and quickly overwhelm, inherited change due to differential replication of variants in response to selection. This prohibits a selectionist but not an evolutionary framework for culture and the creative processes that fuel it. The importance non-Darwinian processes in biological evolution is increasingly recognized. Recent work on the origin of life suggests that early life evolved through a non-Darwinian process referred to as communal exchange that does not involve a self-assembly code, and that natural selection emerged from this more haphazard, ancestral evolutionary process. It is proposed that communal exchange provides an evolutionary framework for culture that enables specification of cognitive features necessary for a (real or artificial) societies to evolve culture. This is supported by a computational model of cultural evolution and a conceptual network based program for documenting material cultural history, and it is consistent with high levels of human cooperation.     

Correlating temporal communication patterns of the Eclipse open source community with performance and creativity

This paper studies the temporal communication patterns of online communities of developers and users of the open source Eclipse Java development environment. It measures the productivity of each community and seeks to identify correlations that exist between group communication characteristics and productivity attributes. The study uses the TeCFlow (Temporal Communication Flow) visualizer to create movie maps of the knowledge flow by analyzing the publicly accessible Eclipse developer mailing lists as an approximation of the social networks of developers and users. Thirty-three different Eclipse communities discussing development and use of components of Eclipse such as the Java Development Tools, the different platform components, the C/C++ Development Tools and the AspectJ extension have been analyzed over a period of six months. The temporal evolution of social network variables such as betweenness centrality, density, contribution index, and degree have been computed and plotted. Productivity of each development group is measured in terms of two indices, namely performance and creativity. Performance of a group is defined as the ratio of new bugs submitted compared with bugs fixed within the same period of time. Creativity is calculated as a function of new features proposed and implemented. Preliminary results indicate that there is a correlation between attributes of social networks such as density and betweenness centrality and group productivity measures in an open source development community. We also find a positive correlation between changes over time in betweenness centrality and creativity, and a negative correlation between changes in betweenness centrality and performance.This paper was tied for Best Paper, NAACSOS (North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science) Annual Conference 2005, June 26–28, Notre Dame. Yared H. Kidane obtained a B.Sc. from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia in Statistics and a M.Sc. in Information Technology specializing in engineering and management of information systems with honors from Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden in June 2005. Yared completed his master’s thesis as an exchange student at MIT. He is currently working for Verizon Wireless as an analyst in the reporting and analysis section. Peter A. Gloor is a research fellow both at the MIT Center for Coordination Science and the Center for Digital Strategies at Tuck at Dartmouth and chief scientist at iQuest Analytics. Previously, he was a partner with Deloitte and PwC. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Zurich in 1989, and was a Post-Doc at the MIT Lab for Computer Science.     

Types of reasoning required in university exams in mathematics

Empirical research shows that students often use reasoning founded on copying algorithms or recalling facts (imitative reasoning) when solving mathematical tasks. Research also indicate that a focus on this type of reasoning might weaken the students’ understanding of the underlying mathematical concepts. It is therefore important to study the types of reasoning students have to perform in order to solve exam tasks and pass exams. The purpose of this study is to examine what types of reasoning students taking introductory calculus courses are required to perform. Tasks from 16 exams produced at four different Swedish universities were analyzed and sorted into task classes. The analysis resulted in several examples of tasks demanding different types of mathematical reasoning. The results also show that about 70% of the tasks were solvable by imitative reasoning and that 15 of the exams could be passed using only imitative reasoning.     

在化学生物学实验中开设小班式创新实验的尝试

以化学专业大四本科生为研究对象,尝试在化学生物学创新实验课程中开设小班式创新实验,从实验内容、教学方法等方面设计创新实验,培养学生综合运用大学前3年所学的基本知识和基本实验技能,提高学生的综合能力和创新意识。     

本科实验课程中的主观能动性激励方法

本科生实验课程是对理论知识进行实践的重要环节。为提高本科生在实验过程中对实验理论和技能的理性认识,增强自主学习的意识和兴趣,提出了“理论质疑”和“步骤调整”的方法,以激励学生在实验过程中能更好地发挥创造性思维,提升实验操作能力。该方法经过作者在指导本科生基础有机化学实验的过程中证明,学生在实验过程中的积极性得到明显提升,增强了对所学理论知识的认识和理解,更善于提出新的科学问题,能对实验方法的合理性和继续改进提出新的见解,理解了“尽信书不如无书”的道理。     

电表改装实验技术性与创新性拓展

本文从物理实验角度讨论了简略的电表准确度等级确定原则,从而加深了学生对常用电表知识的理解,充分调动了学生学习积极主动性和创新意识。     

Describing collective creative acts in a mathematical problem-solving environment

In this article, I report on a study of the nature of collective creativity in mathematics learning settings. Based on an extensive review of the literature on creativity, the study was initially framed by a number of themes to encompass a variety of visions of creativity. These themes were used in the analysis of data collected in a Grade 6 mathematics learning environment. The themes were then refined and (re)developed to distill four creative acts to describe the experience of creativity with(in) the collective. These collective creative acts are: summing forces, expanding possibilities, divergent thinking, and assembling things in new ways. Here, I present the findings of the study, then, I speculate on some of the logical implications of the four collective creative acts for teaching and learning.