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141 books
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126 voters
Cultural Evolution Books
Showing 1-50 of 150
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Hardcover)
by (shelved 15 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.39 — 2,274 ratings — published 2015
Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences (Paperback)
by (shelved 8 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.96 — 114 ratings — published 2011
Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Paperback)
by (shelved 8 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.93 — 315 ratings — published 2004
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 7 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.13 — 4,593 ratings — published 2020
Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.76 — 184 ratings — published
The Selfish Gene (Paperback)
by (shelved 6 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.16 — 196,547 ratings — published 1976
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.14 — 294 ratings — published 1999
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.33 — 1,311,064 ratings — published 2011
The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Unknown Binding)
by (shelved 4 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.61 — 189 ratings — published 2012
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.04 — 468,976 ratings — published 1997
Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.88 — 24 ratings — published
Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.24 — 17 ratings — published 2015
ORIGINS OF UNFAIRNESS:SOCIAL CATEGORIES & CULTURAL EVOLUTION (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.00 — 47 ratings — published
Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.05 — 38 ratings — published 1985
How Traditions Live and Die (Foundations of Human Interaction)
by (shelved 3 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.80 — 10 ratings — published 2015
Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.09 — 161 ratings — published 2017
Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.90 — 404 ratings — published
The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.18 — 44 ratings — published 2004
Cultural Selection (Elements in the Philosophy of Biology)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.50 — 4 ratings — published
This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.96 — 375 ratings — published
A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.86 — 197 ratings — published 2021
A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.89 — 310 ratings — published
Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.07 — 273 ratings — published 2018
The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.23 — 1,749 ratings — published 2018
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.79 — 3,794 ratings — published 2017
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.19 — 28,219 ratings — published 2021
A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.76 — 103 ratings — published 2011
Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (The University Center for Human Values Series)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.69 — 337 ratings — published 2015
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.97 — 458 ratings — published 2011
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.07 — 17,153 ratings — published 1995
On Human Nature (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.14 — 3,667 ratings — published 1978
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.23 — 1,798 ratings — published 1975
Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.69 — 32 ratings — published
The Ministry for the Future (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.86 — 44,748 ratings — published 2020
Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.62 — 47 ratings — published 2003
The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.12 — 17 ratings — published
Essays on Cultural Transmission (LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.50 — 2 ratings — published 2005
Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion (Strüngmann Forum Reports)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.90 — 10 ratings — published 2013
Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.00 — 2 ratings — published
Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.86 — 296 ratings — published 2012
Cultural Evolution and Its Discontents: Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure (ebook)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.75 — 4 ratings — published
The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.68 — 50 ratings — published 2013
Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 4.07 — 101 ratings — published
A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.95 — 60 ratings — published
How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.45 — 1,039 ratings — published 2017
Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.88 — 49 ratings — published
The Evolution of Culture: A Historical and Scientific Overview (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.83 — 24 ratings — published 1999
Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution (Oxford Library of Psychology)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 0.0 — 0 ratings — published
Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.92 — 49 ratings — published 2003
Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as cultural-evolution)
avg rating 3.81 — 16 ratings — published
“1. Human beings meet their needs by using the resources in their environment.
2. Human beings have a limited knowledge of their environment.
3. Human beings have the ability to learn and remember so their knowledge of their environment increases over time.
4. As human knowledge of the environment increases, new ways of meeting human needs become available.
5. If the news ways of meeting human needs are better than the old ways of meeting human needs they will be adopted and the old ways discarded.
6. The adoption of new ways of meeting human needs constitutes social and cultural change in itself, but also leads to further social and cultural change.
7. The order of discovery of new means of meeting human needs follows a particular path from that which is most easily discovered to that which is more difficult to discover. Many discoveries require prior discoveries before the discovery can take place. This means there is a necessary order in the discoveries that constitute and cause social and cultural change.
8. The particular order in the discoveries, means social and cultural change occurs in a particular order, so that the sequence of social and cultural change is inevitable and is rationally understandable.
All of the above statements appear to be obviously correct. If they are then the study of social and cultural history can be considered to be a science in the same way as biological evolution is considered to be a science. Social and cultural change derived from increasing human knowledge is not random and so can be scientifically understood. We can not predict the future of social and cultural change as we do not know what future discoveries we will make. This is analogous to biological evolution where changes in living species are unpredictable as we do not know what changes will occur in the environment of those species. However biological evolution does make changes in living species rationally understandable, just as an analysis of the order of discovery of the human environment makes social and cultural change rationally understandable.”
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2. Human beings have a limited knowledge of their environment.
3. Human beings have the ability to learn and remember so their knowledge of their environment increases over time.
4. As human knowledge of the environment increases, new ways of meeting human needs become available.
5. If the news ways of meeting human needs are better than the old ways of meeting human needs they will be adopted and the old ways discarded.
6. The adoption of new ways of meeting human needs constitutes social and cultural change in itself, but also leads to further social and cultural change.
7. The order of discovery of new means of meeting human needs follows a particular path from that which is most easily discovered to that which is more difficult to discover. Many discoveries require prior discoveries before the discovery can take place. This means there is a necessary order in the discoveries that constitute and cause social and cultural change.
8. The particular order in the discoveries, means social and cultural change occurs in a particular order, so that the sequence of social and cultural change is inevitable and is rationally understandable.
All of the above statements appear to be obviously correct. If they are then the study of social and cultural history can be considered to be a science in the same way as biological evolution is considered to be a science. Social and cultural change derived from increasing human knowledge is not random and so can be scientifically understood. We can not predict the future of social and cultural change as we do not know what future discoveries we will make. This is analogous to biological evolution where changes in living species are unpredictable as we do not know what changes will occur in the environment of those species. However biological evolution does make changes in living species rationally understandable, just as an analysis of the order of discovery of the human environment makes social and cultural change rationally understandable.”
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“Here is what a person is: a set of basically compatible long-range interests that have co-opted a sufficient army of short-range interests into their coalition to maintain stable equilibrium. A person is that person just so long as her revealed preferences at the whole-person level don’t significantly cycle. This is why we can model people as (nonstraightforward) economic agents—just as we sometimes can, and should, model countries. Of course, a biological H. sapiens individual goes through changing external circumstances during its biography, so no one coalition of interests will stay in power forever. Becker and other mature anthropocentric neoclassicists have missed this point, whereas a Samuelsonian neoclassicist can accept it without difficulty. At the same time, the social pressures that discipline self-narratives tend to make people more and more like straightforward economic agents for increasing stretches of their biographies. These pressures are not external to their personal utility functions, as Sen supposes. They are what make (whole-) personal utility functions possible in the first place. Society does not struggle to civilize inner Robinson Crusoes, for people don’t biologically have such things. Instead, human society gives rise to something new under the evolutionary sun: creatures that act increasingly like the economic agents familiar among our asocial relatives, who nevertheless turn the trick of achieving the powerful network efficiencies that the asocial cannot.”
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