Culturomics and the concept of harmony between humans and nature

Abstract

Climate change and human sustainability represent major global challenges that require collaborative solutions through interdisciplinary integration of psychology, earth sciences, environmental sciences, computational sciences, anthropology, and more. While culture serves as a vital mechanism for human adaptation to nature, prior cultural research has largely adopted a reductionist perspective, focusing on isolated scales and single-dimensional features. We propose a cross-scale, interdisciplinary research framework of Culturomics to understand and explore culture from a systems science perspective and investigate the link between climate change and the evolution of human culture and civilization. Grounded in the traditional Chinese philosophy of harmony between humans and nature (天人合一), our research integrates agent-based modeling, historical ethnographic analysis, cross-cultural assessments, psychological and behavioral experiments, and neuroimaging techniques. In combination with advanced analytical tools such as large language models and representational similarity analysis, this project aims to reveal how weather variability shapes human cultural values by altering adaptive environmental behaviors, and to uncover the underlying psychological mechanisms, neural substrates, and evolutionary patterns