ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Culture, humanities, evolution: the complexity of meaning-making over time.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Understanding care experiences amongst immigrant and refugee clients in a Ryan-White funded HIV clinic.Communications medicine · 2025Article
- Foundations of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This article outlines how the historical human sciences see 'culture' and its dynamic developments over time and over generations. The operations of human culture are systemically self-reflexive and, as a result, exhibit a complexity that sets them apart, as a semiotic system, from mere communicative information transfer. Peculiar to this complexity is the two-way interaction between the 'etic' substance of the cultural exchanges and their 'emic' function. Cultural signals require parallel etic/emic processing at stacked levels of complexity. As a result of this complexity, the homeostasis and autopoiesis of human culture, including its dynamics and development over time, cannot be explained fully in terms of responses to the physical environment. How, this article ponders by way of conclusion, can an evolutionary approach be reconciled with these characteristics of human culture, or the notion of culture be applied to evolutionary modelling? This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.