Customer Reviews

Mathematical Models of Social Evolution: A Guide for the Perplexed

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This concise book will allow any mathematically competent but sociobiologically inexperienced reader to dive right into the debates about human evolution. Although the many of the models described in McElreath and Boyd's Guide for the Perplexed come from evolutionary biology and were conceived as genetic models, a great deal of them apply without alteration to related processes in the social world. Take the prisoners dilemma, the battle of the sexes, the Price Equation, or the Phillip Sidney game, honest signaling, and social learning. Everything inside has direct bearing on how we should understand the evolution of social systems, it's just that the *math* has already been worked out by others in the biological sciences.

The social sciences have much to gain from game theory, and this book is a concise, complete and speedy primer.

Robert Boyd is a professor of anthropology at UCLA, and McElreath is his former student, now professor of Anthropology at UC Davis. Boyd, together with Peter Richerson, were early contributors to a dynamic (and correct, I believe) version of sociobiology known as gene-culture coevolution. The theory developed in this book is relevant for anyone interested in social behavior, whether they are biologists, anthropologists, or have their training in another behavioral discipline.

I have written an extended review for the journal Evolutionary Psychology, which should appear in the year 2008.

This book provides a thorough, lucid and near-complete guide to the theories used by sociobiologists like no book has achieved before it. As a working biologist, I strongly recommend it to those interested in why animals and indeed all organisms cooperate, or conflict.

For a mathematically-challenged individual and a novice to cultural evolution, the models explained were tough but the explanations of each were invaluable in providing an understanding of the social world, particularly conflict and cooperation. Strongly recommended to those interested in learning more about social and cultural evolution.

The book is an interesting approach for applying the mathematics to the biology.
The mathematical level don't be very difficult, but the approach is global in the sense we can read the more important questions of the evolution theory, from the hawk-dove model to the selection within and between groups.
It is considered also the signal theory and its cost, correlated to the learning.
The mutation is defined as mistake of the evolution.

The mismatch between title and content is perplexing enough: the book is a summary of biological and game-theoretical modeling that has been done and more competently described by others decades ago. These models have little, if any, connection to what one would consider as "social evolution." The words "society" or "social" do not even appear in the index. The index term closest to the equally absent "culture" is "covariance genetics." Welcome to social evolution!

Even more perplexing: why should a reader perplexed by society be guided away from society and into genetics by, of all people, two anthropologists?