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      Designing cultural multilevel selection research for sustainability science

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          Abstract

          Humans stand out among animals in that we cooperate in large groups to exploit natural resources, and accumulate resource exploitation techniques across generations via cultural learning. This uniquely human form of adaptability is in large part to blame for the global sustainability crisis. This paper builds on cultural evolutionary theory to conceptualize and study environmental resource use and overexploitation. Human social learning and cooperation, particularly regarding social dilemmas, result in both sustainability crises and solutions. Examples include the collapse of global fisheries, and multilateral agreements to halt ozone depletion. We propose an explicitly evolutionary approach to study how crises and solutions may emerge, persist, or disappear. We first present a brief primer on cultural evolution to define group-level cultural adaptations for resource use. This includes criteria for identifying where group-level cultural adaptations may exist, and if a cultural evolutionary approach can be implemented in studying a given system. We then outline a step-by-step process for designing a study of group-level cultural adaptation, including the major methodological considerations that researchers should address in study design, such as tradeoffs between validity and control, issues of time scale, and the value of both qualitative and quantitative data and analysis. We discuss how to evaluate multiple types of evidence synthetically, including historical accounts, new and existing data sets, case studies, and simulations. The electronic supplement provides a tutorial and simple computer code in the R environment to lead users from theory to data to an illustration of an empirical test for group-level adaptations in sustainability research.

          Electronic supplementary material

          The online version of this article (10.1007/s11625-017-0509-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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          The struggle to govern the commons.

          Human institutions--ways of organizing activities--affect the resilience of the environment. Locally evolved institutional arrangements governed by stable communities and buffered from outside forces have sustained resources successfully for centuries, although they often fail when rapid change occurs. Ideal conditions for governance are increasingly rare. Critical problems, such as transboundary pollution, tropical deforestation, and climate change, are at larger scales and involve nonlocal influences. Promising strategies for addressing these problems include dialogue among interested parties, officials, and scientists; complex, redundant, and layered institutions; a mix of institutional types; and designs that facilitate experimentation, learning, and change.
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            Late Pleistocene demography and the appearance of modern human behavior.

            The origins of modern human behavior are marked by increased symbolic and technological complexity in the archaeological record. In western Eurasia this transition, the Upper Paleolithic, occurred about 45,000 years ago, but many of its features appear transiently in southern Africa about 45,000 years earlier. We show that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation. Genetic estimates of regional population size over time show that densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared. Demographic factors can thus explain geographic variation in the timing of the first appearance of modern behavior without invoking increased cognitive capacity.
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              A Framework to Analyze the Robustness of Social-ecological Systems from an Institutional Perspective

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                michelle.ann.kline@gmail.com
                Journal
                Sustain Sci
                Sustain Sci
                Sustainability Science
                Springer Japan (Tokyo )
                1862-4065
                1862-4057
                21 November 2017
                21 November 2017
                2018
                : 13
                : 1
                : 9-19
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 7494, GRID grid.61971.38, Department of Psychology, , Simon Fraser University, ; Burnaby, BC Canada
                [2 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2151 2636, GRID grid.215654.1, Institute of Human Origins, , Arizona State University, ; Tempe, USA
                [3 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2151 2636, GRID grid.215654.1, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, , Arizona State University, ; Tempe, USA
                [4 ]ISNI 0000000121820794, GRID grid.21106.34, School of Economics, , University of Maine, ; Orono, USA
                [5 ]ISNI 0000000121820794, GRID grid.21106.34, Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, , University of Maine, ; Orono, USA
                [6 ]ISNI 0000000096214564, GRID grid.266190.a, Environmental Studies Program, , University of Colorado Boulder, ; Boulder, USA
                Article
                509
                10.1007/s11625-017-0509-2
                6086275
                30147767
                f195b094-7738-45cc-9f07-96d2543c6feb
                © The Author(s) 2017

                Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

                History
                : 28 February 2017
                : 1 November 2017
                Funding
                Funded by: National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center Venture Grant
                Award ID: DBI-1052875
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000925, John Templeton Foundation;
                Award ID: 14020515
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001, National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: SES-1352361
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100005825, National Institute of Food and Agriculture;
                Award ID: ME021515
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Special Feature: Original Article
                Custom metadata
                © Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2018

                cultural evolution,group-level cultural selection,social dilemmas,cultural multilevel selection,evolution of sustainable systems

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