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A legal document by which a person expresses his or her wish as to how his or her property is to be distributed at death.
As discussed elsewhere in this work (Peedicayil 2018), cultural inheritance involves the storage and transmission of information by communication, imitation, teaching, and learning. In this context, there is evidence that complex social behaviors like human altruism and mate choice (Rushton et al. 1986), social attitudes (Martin et al. 1986), personality (Eaves et al. 1999), and the human sex ratio (Lipatov et al. 2008) are culturally transmitted. The cultural transmission of such behaviors, for obvious reasons, will occur effectively only in an animal species that is social, i.e., where the members live in groups and interact freely with one another. Human beings are the prototype of that type of animal species and the groups they live in are termed societies (Wilson 2000). Indeed, the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle had stated...
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References
Aristotle. (2015). Politics. London: Aeterna Press.
Eaves, L., Heath, A., Martin, N., Maes, H., Neale, M., Kendler, K., et al. (1999). Comparing the biological and cultural inheritance of personality and social attitudes in the Virginia 30,000 study of twins and their relatives. Twin Research, 2, 62–80.
Lipatov, M., Li, S., & Feldman, M. W. (2008). Economics, cultural transmission, and the dynamics of the sex ratio at birth in China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 19171–19176.
Martin, N. G., Eaves, L. J., Heath, A. C., Jardine, R., Feingold, L. M., & Eysenck, H. J. (1986). Transmission of social attitudes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 83, 4364–4368.
Peedicayil, J. (2018). Cultural inheritance. In T. K. Schackelford & V. A. Schackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of evolutionary psychological science. New York: Springer.
Rushton, J. P., Littlefield, C. H., & Lumsden, C. J. (1986). Gene-culture coevolution of complex social behavior: Human altruism and mate choice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 83, 7340–7343.
Wikipedia. (2018). Will and Testament. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_and_testament. Accessed 12 Feb 2018.
Wilson, E. O. (2000). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Peedicayil, J. (2018). Will After Death. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1092-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1092-1
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