The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition)

✍ Scribed by Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 464
• Edition: First Edition
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Oxford presents, in one convenient and coherently organized volume, 20 influential but until now relatively inaccessible articles that form the backbone of Boyd and Richerson's path-breaking work on evolution and culture. Their interdisciplinary research is based on two notions. First, that culture is crucial for understanding human behavior; unlike other organisms, 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. Culture then is a pool of information, stored in the brains of the population that gets transmitted from one brain to another by social learning processes. Therefore, culture can account for both our outstanding ecological success as well as the maladaptations that characterize much of human behavior. The interest in this collection will span anthropology, psychology, economics, philosophy, and political science.

✦ Table of Contents

Aknowledgments......Page 5
Introduction......Page 11
PART 1 The Evolution of
Social Learning......Page 21
Social Learning as an Adaptation......Page 27
Why Does Culture Increase Human Adaptability?......Page 43
Why Culture Is Common, but Cultural Evolution Is Rare......Page 60
Climate, Culture, and the Evolution of Cognition......Page 74
Norms and Bounded Rationality......Page 91
PART 2 Etnic Groups and Markers......Page 107
The Evolution of Ethnic Markers......Page 111
Shared Norms and the Evolution of Ethnic Markers......Page 126
PART 3 Human Cooperation, Reciprocity, and Group Selection......Page 141
The Evolution of Reciprocity in Sizable Groups......Page 153
Punishment Allows the Evolution of Cooperation......Page 174
Why People Punish Defectors:......Page 197
Can Group-Functional Behaviors Evolve by Cultural GroupSelection?......Page 212
Group-Beneficial Norms Can Spread Rapidly in a StructuredPopulation......Page 235
The Evolution of Altruistic Punishment......Page 249
Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation......Page 259
PART 4 Archaeology and Culture History......Page 291
How Microevolutionary Processes Give Rise to History......Page 295
Are Cultural Phylogenies Possible?......Page 318
Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatoryduring the Holocene?......Page 345
PART 5 Links to Other Disciplines......Page 383
Rationality, Imitation, and Tradition......Page 387
Simple Models of Complex Phenomena......Page 405
Memes: Universal Acid or a Better Mousetrap?......Page 428
Author Index......Page 445
Subject Index......Page 454