Sam Passmore is a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, within the Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative (ECDI).
Sam is an interdisciplinary researcher who has worked in fields such as Anthropology, Psychology, Linguistics, and Economics. His research focuses on cultural macro-evolution and diversity using quantitative and statistical methods. Sam has used cultural macro-evolution to understand the movement and history of a variety of cultural phenomena such as: kinship, language, music, environmental behaviours, political and economic structure, and religion.
Sam completed his PhD at the University of Bristol (UK). His thesis explored the diversity and evolution of kinship terminology finding that existing typologies underestimate global diversity, and finding evidence against universal patterns of kinship terminology change. More recently, Sam has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck institute for the Science of Human History (Germany), studying global diversity in linguistic grammar, and at Keio University (Japan) examining signals of cultural history in traditional folk music.
| Research area/theme |
| Transdisciplinarity |
| Peopling Sahul |
| Holocene Revolutions |
| Local Diversification |
| Transitions |
| Island Melanesia after Lapita |
Relevant publications
Preprints
Wood, A., Kirby, K. R., Ember, C., Silbert, S., Passmore, S., Daikoku, H., … Savage, P. E. The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4z97j (Pre-Print)
Journal Articles
Passmore, S., & Watts, J. (In Press). WEIRD People and The Western Church: Who made whom? Religion, Brain & Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991459
Skirgard, H., Haynie, H., Blasi, D., Hammarstrom, H., Collins, J., Latarche, J., Lesage, J., Weber, T., Witzlack-Makarevich, A., Passmore, S., Chira, A., Maurits, L., Dinnage, R., Dunn, M., Reesink, G., Singer, R., Bowern, C., Epps, P., Hill, J., … Evans, N., Gray, R. 2023. Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Advances. 9(16). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adg6175
Passmore, S., Barth, W., Quinn, K., Greenhill, S. J., Evans, N., & Jordan, F. M. (2021). Kin Against Kin: Internal Co-selection and the Coherence of Kinship Typologies. Biological Theory. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-021-00379-6
Passmore, S., & Jordan, F. M. (2020). No universals in the cultural evolution of kinship terminology. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2020.41
Watts, J., Passmore, S., Jackson, J. C., Rzymski, C., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2020). Text analysis shows conceptual overlap as well as domain-specific differences in Christian and secular worldviews. Cognition, 201, 104290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104290
Roberts, S. G., Killin, A., Deb, A., Sheard, C., Greenhill, S. J., Sinnemäki, K., … [Passmore, S.] … Jordan, F. (2020). CHIELD: The causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database. Journal of Language Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzaa001
Rácz, P., Passmore, S., Sheard, C., & Jordan, F. M. (2019). Usage frequency and lexical class determine the evolution of kinship terms in Indo-European. Royal Society Open Science, 6(10), 191385. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.191385
Rácz, P., Passmore, S., & Jordan, F. M. (2019). Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross-Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems. Topics in Cognitive Science, 12(2), 744–765. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12430
Sookias, R. B., Passmore, S., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2018). Deep cultural ancestry and human development indicators across nation states. Royal Society Open Science, 5(4), 171411. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171411
Atkinson, Q. D., Coomber, T., Passmore, S., Greenhill, S. J., & Kushnick, G. (2016). Cultural and Environmental Predictors of Pre-European Deforestation on Pacific Islands. PloS One, 11(5), e0156340. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0156340
Matthews, L. J., Passmore, S., Richard, P. M., Gray, R. D., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2016). Shared Cultural History as a Predictor of Political and Economic Changes among Nation States. PloS One, 11(4), e0152979. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152979
Evolution of Cultural Diversity 