Significance

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If you look at the paleo-climatic record, you can see that the environment starts to fluctuate a lot starting about 900,000 years ago and going to about six or five hundred thousand years ago. This would have created a selection pressure for lots of cultural learning.edge

Experiments run at UBC and elsewhere have shown that when you remind atheists, it doesn't matter, but if you remind believers of their god, believers cheat less, and they're more pro social or fair in exchange tasks, and the kinds of exchange tasks that they're more pro social in are the ones with anonymous others, or strangers. These are the kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor. Edge

  There's an interaction between genes and culture. Sometimes you get the impression from economics that markets are for self-interested individuals. They're actually the opposite. Self-interested individuals don't specialize, and they don't take it, because there's all this trust and fairness that are required to make markets run with impersonal others.Edge

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Many people think of cultural transmission as relying on language, but that's in part because in our culture, especially among academics, there tends to be a lot of talking, but in lots of small-scale societies, it's quite clear that there's tons of cultural transmission that's just strictly by observational learning.Edge



Culture is part of our biology. 

Andrew Gelman, on significance The difference between ‘significant’ and ‘not significant’ is not itself statistically significant t