The Origin and Evolution of Cultures

Over the past 25 years, Boyd and Richerson have become well-known across a wide range of disciplines for their path-breaking work on evolution and culture. This work collects twenty of the influential but relatively inaccessible published articels that form the backbone of this research. It could not be more timely given the growing influence of evolutionary psychology. The papers - which were published in a diverse set of journals and which are not easily available - a conceptually linked and form a cohesive, unified evolutionary account of human culture. Their interdisciplinary research is based on two notions. First, that culture is crucial for understanding human behavior: unlike other organism, socially transmitted beliefs, attitudes and values heavily influence our behavior. Secondly, culture is part of biology: the capacity to acquire and transmit culture is a derived component of human psychology, and the contents of culture are deeply intertwined with our biology. Taking off from these two assumptions, Boyd and Richerson's novel idea is that culture is a pool of information, stored in the brains of a population, that gets transmitted from one brain to another by social learning processes. Among their conclusions: culture can account for both our astounding ecological success as well as the maladaptations that characterize much of human behavior. Interest in Boyd and Richerson's work spans anthropology, psychology, economics, philosophy, and political science, and has influenced work on animal behavior, economics and game theory, memes, and even archaeology.

ISBN 019518145X   Pages 464 ISBN13 9780195181456 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Oxford University Press Inc   Weight (grammes) 640 Imprint Oxford University Press Inc   Published in New York Format Paperback   Series title Evolution and Cognition Series Publication date 01 Jan 2005   Height (mm) 234 Library of Congress 2004043408   Width (mm) 156 DEWEY 306   Spine width (mm) 25 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

1		Social learning as an adaptation		19
2		Why does culture increase human adaptability?		35
3		Why culture is common, but cultural evolution is rare		52
4		Climate, culture, and the evolution of cognition		66
5		Norms and bounded rationality		83
6		The evolution of ethnic markers		103
7		Shared norms and the evolution of ethnic markers by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson and Richard McElreath		118
8		The evolution of reciprocity in sizable groups		145
9		Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups		166
10		Why people punish defectors : weak conformist transmission can stabilixe costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson and Joseph Soltis		189
12		Group-beneficial norms can spread rapidly in a structured population		227
13		The evolution of altruistic punishment by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson and Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles		241
14		Cultural evolution of human cooperation by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson and Joseph Henrich		251
15		How microevolutionary proceses give rise to history		287
16		Are cultural phylogenies possible? by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and William H. Durham		310
17		Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? : a climate change hypothesis by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson and Robert L. Bettinger		337
18		Rationality, imitation, and tradition		379
19		Simple models of complex phenomena : the case of cultural evolution		397
20		Memes : universal acid or a better mousetrap?		420

There is much to learn from the work of Boyd and Richerson, and the initiative to bring together some of their scattered papers in this volume is laudable. Many professional anthrologists, biologists, philosophers and psychologists interested in the study of culture and the evolution of mind and behavior will benefit from it. --Metapsychology

"This book is a must-have for philosophers of psychology, philosophers of biology, philosophers of the social sciences, and, more generally, anybody who is interested in the evolution of mind and behavior." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Boyd and Richerson have long set a 'gold standard' of sensible, reasonable writing on evolutionary social science...they have patiently built solid, competent, genuinely predictive models of how humans evolved and how culture evolved as humanity's special class of behavior...they are genuine authorities on both biology and culture...the authors have produced a superb companion volume, Not by G

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