A Gift from the Culture
"A Gift from the Culture", published in 1987, is a short work of space opera, by the Scottish science fiction author Iain M. Banks. The story is an early venture into the "complex and unusual and very distant" setting of the Culture, which Banks would further develop through various of full length novels, stories, and his essay "A Few Notes on the Culture".
David G. Hays
After leaving RAND and assuming his position at Buffalo, Hays turned to more a more general interest in language and cognition and, ultimately, the evolution of human culture. He developed an approach to abstract concepts in which their meaning was grounded in stories. Hays elaborated this idea in a series of articles and several of his graduate students, including Brian Phillips, Mary White, and William Benzon, employed the idea in their work. In 1982 he published "Cognitive Structures", in which he developed a novel scheme for grounding cognition in perception and action as conceived in the control theory of William T. Powers. Working with William Benzon, he published a neural interpretation of this theory in 1988. During the 1980s and early 1990s he and Benzon developed a theory of cultural rank which they published in a series of papers (together and individually) and a book on the history of technology (Hays alone) in the early 1990s. His last major work was a critical review and synthesis of the empirical work that anthropologists and archaeologists had done on cultural complexity. This book was published posthumously as "The Measurement of Cultural Evolution in the Non-Literate World: Homage to Raoul Naroll." At the time of his death, he had embarked on a study of the ballet, looking to understand how motion generates emotion.