Take Home Exam

1. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson write: “To get the benefits of social learning, human beings have to be credulous, for the most part accepting the ways that they observe in their society as sensible and proper, but such credulity opens human minds to the spread of maladaptive beliefs. The problem is one of information costs. The advantage of culture is that individuals don’t have to invent everything for themselves. We get wondrous adaptations like kayaks and blowguns on the cheap. The trouble is that a greed for easy adaptive traditions easily leads to perpetuating maladaptions that somehow arise.” Discuss.

2. It has been suggested* that dada is to Surrealism what Theravada is Mahayana. To what extent is this analogy accurate? Your answer can be in either Pali or Sanskrit.

*In this sentence.