A Comparison of Alignment Procedures for Tests of Galton's Problem

Abstract

4 variant relationships,&dquo; &dquo;causal arrows,&dquo; etc., between the &dquo;parts&dquo; or &dquo;events&dquo; of psychohistorical phenomena, a new wave of historians and philosophers of scientific inquiry are stressing that there have been profound conceptual shifts in our appreciation of detail statements for the nature of physical phenomena. An appreciation of this new approach shifts the attention from the prose-laden imposition of the concepts of &dquo;natural selection,&dquo; etc., on psychohistorical phenomena to the imposing task of coordinating and merging the findings of the growth, transmission, and spatial-temporal distribution of diverse concepts and what they lead to for the people involved as found in ethnographic, historical, psychological, philosophical, and scientific studies.From an anthropological point of view, the history of Western science is the best temporally recorded ethnography of a few human beings assigning meaning to the universe. The emergence of scientific inquiry can be conceptualized as a means of structuring potential conceptual contention in communicating. Whereas Western thought in general has been organized around the concepts of &dquo;normal&dquo; and &dquo;deviations,&dquo; &dquo;scientific societies&dquo; formed within the larger societies to construct an interlocking network of ideas and concepts sufficient to understand the natural manifold. The dynamics are argumentation through demonstration and documentation. The concepts of &dquo;polylectics&dquo; and &dquo;transmutations&dquo; of semantic networks are presented.Most of the tests for Galton's problem require that sample societies be aligned in terms of their estimated interdependence, so that the similarity of contiguous societies can be evaluated.

How the West was One: Explaining the Similarities in Race-Specific Homicide Rates in the West and South

“…Discussions of the disproportionately higher rates of white homicide in the South have focused primarily on cultural explanations or structural arguments (Gastil 1971;Loftin & Hill 1974;Messner , 1983b. We assert that white homicide rates in the South, by and large, are not the product of structural predictors.…”

Altered States of Consciousness within a General Evolutionary Perspective: A Holocultural Analysis

“…As a propinquity test, it is based on the assumption that diffusion is most likely to occur between societies that are geographical neighbors. To construct our geographic alignments, we used Murdock and White's (1969) contiguous culture areas, as suggested by Loftin and Hill (1974).…”

Galton's Problem and HRAFLIB

“…This Murdock-White alignment considers linguistic and other historical relationships as well as geographical propinquity. Loftin and Hill (1974) showed that the Murdock-White alignment was more powerful than any of the Naroll alignments and hence presumably a better measure of cultural diffusion.…”