Customer Reviews

The Evolution of Culture: A Historical and Scientific Overview

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This is a great book for anyone seriously interested in questions about the evolution of human behavior, especially questions about how human cooperation, altruism, culture, and language could have evolved. It is a great leap beyond mathematical models based on Prisoner's Dilemma.

It is an edited collection of technical essays by anthropologists engaged with evolutionary theory. It is, however, accessible to any serious reader and contains many insights that will eventually work their way into more popular books on the evolution of human behavior.

I read this for insights about how large brains, altruism, language, symbolic culture, and religious practices could have evolved through a series of small, evolutionarily beneficial steps. I won't try to do justice to the technical results, but a couple key theories are that early social intelligence evolved from its benefits for coalition building among females (soon there will be a book asking why modern politics is controlled by males!) and that answers to evolutionary benefit lie more in mate selection rather than survival benefits (intelligence is beneficial for the same reason as a peacock's tail).

The concept of "culture" has been long used as a lever to sever humanity from the path of evolution. The fragile nature of that lever truly is the theme of this book. By assembling a team of scientists from various fields of study, the editors have fashioned a comprehensive picture of many elements comprising human culture. Structuring the book around themes of universal interest, they establish a sound scientific base for a difficult topic. While the book is intended for an academic audience, the editors have chosen their authors carefully. The material isn't buried in arcane language. The authors use clear, straightforward prose in presenting their evidence. It's important to remember that it is evidence, not mere speculation, that is being offered in these articles.

The editors set the theme of "applying a rigorous Darwinian analysis" to human culture in their Introduction. They remind us that this is a topic that has long eluded a disciplined investigation. Darwinian approaches to human evolution are difficult, but the editors contend that solid research offers insights previous scholars have ignored or not attempted. Their selection of three major themes, society, language, art and religion, allows them to demonstrate how these areas reflect the evolutionary process in our species.

To recount the eleven essays here would effectively re-write the book. There are pieces dealing with various forms of symbolism, the application of cooperation and altruism, and courting behaviour. The authors frequently remind us that evolution goes far beyond mere "survival". A mulititude of elements interplay in determining which individuals are "fittest" in the human environment. Art, for example, has many roots, and "body painting" is but one of many of them. In Camilla Powers' essay, she demonstrates how mating rituals, community organisation and colour recognition work together to build art forms and social structure. Religion, an item of intense debate, is skillfully examined in Steven Mithen's essay on how humans came to devise the idea of the supernatural. He suggests that the idea of a "supernatural" being arose with the maturation of human cognition. Religion, therefore, arose not as a survival trait, but merely as an extension of human cognitive capability.

The information offered in each essay is thoroughly referenced at the end of the piece. There are illustrative charts and graphics summarising the information in the text. In all, this collection will stand for some time as a foundation for further work. The editorial team is to be congratulated for their effort in bringing together so many fine authors addressing a difficult topic. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

A professional trade-book, like any edited book. I recommend it for those interested in the causes behind universal modern human behaviors. It offers a more comparative and scientifically informed perspective compared to that of cultural anthropologists, who focus on single populations or areas. The authors examine in depth and test the reasons for specific behaviors, like women's use of red cosmetics and the preponderance of men of a certain age in the music industry. See especially Power's exciting re-evaluation of human sociopolitics based on studies of female coalitions surrounding fertility rituals in Sub-Saharan societies.

Most readers won't miss this, but that is just the problem: none of the authors takes the opportunity to focus on culture in non-human animals. Only Dunbar's paper takes extensive examples from other species, as his paper is based on general principles of sociality. The fact that the book's subjects range from language to the problem of the free-rider to religion, and can still be called limited with respect to its title, reveals the uselessness of the term "culture" for anything but evoking and propogating species-chauvinism.