This volume offers an integrative approach to the application of evolutionary theory in studies of cultural transmission and social evolution and reveals the enormous range of ways in which Darwinian ideas can lead to productive empirical research, the touchstone of any worthwhile theoretical perspective. While many recent works on cultural evolution adopt a specific theoretical framework, such as dual inheritance theory or human behavioral ecology, Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution emphasizes empirical analysis and includes authors who employ a range of backgrounds and methods to address aspects of culture from an evolutionary perspective. Editor Stephen Shennan has assembled archaeologists, evolutionary theorists, and ethnographers, whose essays cover a broad range of time periods, localities, cultural groups, and artifacts.

The evolution of land space demonstrates the shift of land use types from natural and semi-natural land (e.g., forest land and cropland) to built-up land, altering ecosystem cycling patterns and leading to degradation of ecosystem services in terms of regulation, provisioning and support. At the same time, production and living space crowding out ecological space brings high potential threats, such as soil erosion, forest productivity decline and habitat fragmentation. Accordingly, in response to the problems of imbalanced territorial space development, inefficient resource utilization and ecological environment degradation, how to improve the diversity, stability and sustainability of ecosystems is an urgent issue to promote modernization and green development in the new era of territorial space evolution.

This book offers a broad interdisciplinary overview of state-of-the-art research on landform related issues. It presents a selection of papers given at the International Symposium on "Landform – structure, evolution process control", Bonn, June 2007.

Social scientists can learn a lot from evolutionary biology - from systematics and principles of evolutionary ecology to theories of social interaction including competition, conflict and cooperation, as well as niche construction, complexity, eco-evo-devo, and the role of the individual in evolutionary processes. Darwinian sociocultural evolutionary theory applies the logic of Darwinism to social-learning based cultural and social change. With a multidisciplinary approach for graduate biologists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, social psychologists, archaeologists, linguists, economists, political scientists and science and technology specialists, the author presents this model of evolution drawing on a number of sophisticated aspects of biological evolutionary theory. The approach brings together a broad and inclusive theoretical framework for understanding the social sciences which addresses many of the dilemmas at their forefront - the relationship between history and necessity, conflict and cooperation, the ideal and the material and the problems of agency, subjectivity and the nature of social structure.

Drawing on Kent Flannery's forty years of cross-cultural research in the area, the contributors to this collection reflect the current diversity of contemporary approaches to the study of cultural evolutionary processes. Collectively the volume expresses the richness of the issues being investigated by comparative theorists interested in long-term change, as well as the wide variety of data, approaches, and ideas that researchers are employing to examine these questions.

The book gives an overview of important research topics recently addressed in evolutionary Neo-Schumpeterian Economics. The list of research questions and applications of Neo-Schumpeterian reasoning impressively demonstrates the rich possibilities ranging from theoretical issues addressing human behaviour to applied areas like the emergence of biotechnology in developing countries, the role of innovation on financial markets and the R&D strategies of multinational enterprises. The chapters in this book bring together a rich set of new analytical and empirical methodologies which allow for new relevant and rigorous insights in innovation processes which are responsible for economic development and structural change.​

Molecular evolution, phylogenetics, genomics, and other related topics are all critical to understanding evolutionary processes. All too frequently, however, they are treated separately in textbooks and courses, such that students fail to connect all of the concepts, principles, and nuances of the evolutionary processes. Integrated Molecular Evolut

Proceedings of a symposium at Vorarlberg, Austria, July 1989, called to allow interaction between scientists working in areas of biological and biophysical research, and those working in physics and mathematics. The 11 papers include discussions of such topics as symmetry in synthetic and natural pe