The Origin and Evolution of Cultures

by Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson

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 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.

Genres: Science, Evolution, Cultural, Anthropology, Biology, Sociology, Archaeology

456 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Robert Boyd is a professor of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.

Reviews

[Usfromdk]

The first half of the book was not easy to read due to the technical nature of the coverage, and so I decided to put it away for a while. However I did pick it up again, and I'm really glad I did as there's simply no way around the fact that this book is awesome. Some of the chapters in this book are chapters you need to read.

Highly recommended. Probably the best book I've read this year.

[Vaughn]

a stunning book about culture and evolution from two biologists.

[Ayush]

insane to me how strong gaussian and linear models are, should’ve learned ab this earlier :P

[Rebecca]

Was enjoying it until there was a graph for every idea - yikers!

[Jukka Aakula]

A classic of the dual-inheritance model or cultural evolution