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.

Aknowledgments......Page 6 Introduction......Page 12 PART 1 The Evolution of Social Learning......Page 22 Social Learning as an Adaptation......Page 28 Why Does Culture Increase Human Adaptability?......Page 44 Why Culture Is Common, but Cultural Evolution Is Rare......Page 61 Climate, Culture, and the Evolution of Cognition......Page 75 Norms and Bounded Rationality......Page 92 PART 2 Etnic Groups and Markers......Page 108 The Evolution of Ethnic Markers......Page 112 Shared Norms and the Evolution of Ethnic Markers......Page 127 PART 3 Human Cooperation, Reciprocity, and Group Selection......Page 142 The Evolution of Reciprocity in Sizable Groups......Page 154 Punishment Allows the Evolution of Cooperation......Page 175 Why People Punish Defectors:......Page 198 Can Group-Functional Behaviors Evolve by Cultural GroupSelection?......Page 213 Group-Beneficial Norms Can Spread Rapidly in a StructuredPopulation......Page 236 The Evolution of Altruistic Punishment......Page 250 Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation......Page 260 PART 4 Archaeology and Culture History......Page 292 How Microevolutionary Processes Give Rise to History......Page 296 Are Cultural Phylogenies Possible?......Page 319 Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatoryduring the Holocene?......Page 346 PART 5 Links to Other Disciplines......Page 384 Rationality, Imitation, and Tradition......Page 388 Simple Models of Complex Phenomena......Page 406 Memes: Universal Acid or a Better Mousetrap?......Page 429 Author Index......Page 446 Subject Index......Page 455

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