The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition) (Paperback)

~ Robert Boyd (Author), Peter J. Richerson (Author)
Key Phrases: prosocial genes, fewer learning errors, culture increase human adaptability, New York, Cambridge University Press, New Guinea (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

There is much to learn from the work of Boyd and Richerson, and the initiative to bring together some of their scattered papers in this volume is laudable. Many professional anthrologists, biologists, philosophers and psychologists interested in the study of culture and the evolution of mind and behavior will benefit from it. --Metapsychology
"This book is a must-have for philosophers of psychology, philosophers of biology, philosophers of the social sciences, and, more generally, anybody who is interested in the evolution of mind and behavior." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
"Boyd and Richerson have long set a 'gold standard' of sensible, reasonable writing on evolutionary social science...they have patiently built solid, competent, genuinely predictive models of how humans evolved and how culture evolved as humanity's special class of behavior...they are genuine authorities on both biology and culture...the authors have produced a superb companion volume, Not by Genes Alone, which makes their work accessible to all."--CHOICE

Product Description

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 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. 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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (January 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019518145X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195181456
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #197,339 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bridgeing natural and social sciences: the case of cultural evolution, July 6, 2006

By	F. T. S. Kerstholt (Tilburg, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is a splendid and well-organised collection of papers in which the authors developed and argued for their understanding and explanation of humans and human societies. This theory is known as the theory of dual inheritance.

The book consists of 5 parts: the evolution of social learning; ethnic groups and markers; human cooperation, reciprocity and group selection; archaeology and culture history; and finally links to other disciplines.

Being a social scientist whose interest in long-term historical processes increasingly stretched out until it comprised the evolution of hominids and homines and who learnt a lot of the biological and archaeological part of the story from books by Robert Boyd and colleagues, this book adds a kind of finishing touch.

From other work by Boyd I learnt that there are alternatives or rather extensions to socio-biology and evolutionary psychology that preserve a lot of sociological wisdom on the nature and mechanisms of institutional change. The key is that cultural change, which is predicated on the evolutionary acquired capacities to (observational) learning and cooperation by mostly credulous beings, can lead to cumulative adaptive changes which could not have been caused by natural selection.

Robert Boyd and Joan B. Silk, How Humans Evolved, W.W. Norton & Company, New York. London, 2003, 3rd ed.) already convinced me of the wisdom and validity of the approach. The most attractive feature of the book under review here lies in the fact that the ideas put forward and explained in the Boyd-Silk textbook can be found argued in a much more detail and scientific finesse.

In my view the book is indispensable for social scientists trying to find their way in the controversies that still surround this important field of intellectual endeavours


One personal note: I still do not completely understand the following enigmatic paragraph in Boyd and Silk (2003, p. 475):
"If aging is due to antagonistic pleiotropy, there will be many synchronized causes of aging.
Organisms are complex systems with many different, partially independent subsystems, each potentially subject to aging. The kinds of failures leading to aging of the teeth are likely to be quite different from the kinds of failures leading to aging of the heart, eye, or brain.
To see why these processes should be synchronized, suppose that one cause of aging, such as heart disease, acts at much earlier ages than all of the other causes of aging.
Then selection would either favor the postponement of the expression of genes that cause heart disease so that heart disease becomes synchronized with other forms of aging, or it would favor earlier action of all the other causes of aging, so that they become synchronized with heart disease.
In either case selection would cause all forms of aging to occur simultaneously.
Thus if aging, is due to antagonistic pleiotropy, it is unlikely that curing one, or only a few processes would lead to indefinitely long life."

Frans Kerstholt

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Baldwin effect writ large, May 14, 2007

By	Steve Reina (Troy Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition) (Hardcover)

Over a hundred years ago, James Baldwin posited that through the development of a good trick individuals could give themselves a survival advantage over individuals lacking such a good trick.

As a simple illustration, monkeys using sticks to extract ants from an anthill would have an advantage over monkeys who fail to use such a tool. Likewise, vampire bats who share their evening take with less successful bats and thereby are reciprocated on nights when they themselves are unsuccessful at the hunt would be another example.

Significantly, through culture, human opportunities to acquire knowledge of useful tools and acquire society through which to obtain reciprocal benefits have sort of created a Baldwin effect writ large...an uber good trick that has enabled them to populate pretty much every biosphere on the planet.

This book is a very articulated discussion of the delicate calculus of this process in human society propogated on all levels...from the reasons for its origins to comparisons in interdisciplinary study of its findings.
Relevant to law, economics and religious studies, it's a significant and helpful read.