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The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition) Illustrated Edition

by Robert Boyd (Author), Peter J. Richerson (Author)

3.7 6 ratings

Part of: Evolution and Cognition (13 books)

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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.

ISBN-10

019518145X
ISBN-13

978-0195181456
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Illustrated
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

January 20, 2005
Part of series

Evolution and Cognition
Language

English
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9.18 x 6.18 x 0.97 inches
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456 pages
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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

About the Author

Peter J. Richerson is Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; Illustrated edition (January 20, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 456 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 019518145X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195181456
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.41 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.18 x 6.18 x 0.97 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,754,719 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,858 in Medical Cognitive Psychology
- #4,277 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- #8,027 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)

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3.7 6 ratings

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Peter J. Richerson
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Peter J. Richerson Is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California—Davis. His research focuses on the processes of cultural evolution. His 1985 book with Robert Boyd, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, applied the mathematical tools used by organic evolutionists to study a number of basic problems in human cultural evolution. His later books with Boyd include Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, an introduction to cultural evolution aimed at a broad audience and The Origins and Evolution of Cultures, a compendium of their more important papers and book chapters. He has recently co-edited a book Cultural Evolution with Morten Christiansen reporting the results of a Strüngmann Forum. His recent publications used theoretical models to try to understand some of the main events in human evolution, such as the evolution of the advanced capacity for imitation (and hence cumulative cultural evolution) in humans, the origins of tribal and larger scale cooperation, and the origins of agriculture. He and his colleagues also investigate cultural evolution in laboratory microsocieties.
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Daniel Cloud

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 22, 2015

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This compilation is essential reading for anyone interested in the topic of cultural evolution.

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Tim Tyler

20 of Boyd and Richerson's better papers

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 29, 2013

Boyd and Richerson have been plugging away at cultural evolution problem since the 1970s, and they have made a bunch of progress on the problem. This book reports on the highlights of 30 years of their research.

It came out in the same year as their more popular book "Not By Genes Alone". Their previous book, "Culture and the Evolutionary Process" had come out in 1985 - 20 years before. Suddenly they had three books on the subject instead of one.

The book is pretty good - significantly better than their first book on the topic. There are a number of classic papers collected together in this volume.

The book suffers from a high density of mathematical models, but these are sometimes split off in appendices, and aren't as intrusive as they could be.

Most of the papers are worthwhile, but some of them are duds. Boyd and Richerson waste a paper on the topic of why humans engage in costly punishment, by arguing the dud thesis that punishment is "a side effect of a tendency to adopt common behaviours during enculturation". Punishment is a common part of reinforcement learning, which is a basic behavioural change technique, used by parents on their offspring, and by teachers on their students. Its prospect also acts as a deterrent.

As to why people pay the costs to punish, some punish because they are paid to do so. Those who punish kin reap net inclusive fitness benefits via kin selection. Some punish because administering punishment is a high-status activity - or because it elevates them in the pecking order. The issue is not such a mystery in the first place, and a theory about punishment as a "maladaptive side effect of conformist transmission" which is spread by "cultural group selection" is just daft. To make up for this, Boyd and Richerson's other paper on punishment in this volume is a classic.

Another dud paper is the one on reciprocity in large groups. Or rather the paper isn't dud (though their model of reciprocity within groups seems pretty silly), but rather the way it is cited by the rest of the papers to justify the idea that reciprocity doesn't work in large groups (and so therefore cooperation in large groups must be maintained by group selection). Reciprocity between pairs of individuals works pretty well in groups of reasonable size, and is an important aspect of cooperation within groups. Boyd and Richerson come across as just confused about the scope of reciprocity in this volume - and this is unfortunate due to the substantial significance of reciprocity in producing cooperative behaviour in groups of humans.

I should also briefly mention Boyd and Richerson's unsympathetic paper on memes. It is pretty ridiculous. To end the paper with "memes are not a universal acid, but they are a better mouse trap" makes me want to say: "um wasn't it *Darwinism* that Dennett claimed to bear an unmistakable likeness to universal acid?" Nobody said that *memes* were a universal acid in the first place. Talk about a straw man attack." This paper was also published closer to the time it was written - in the book "Darwinizing Culture". I've already reviewed it - in my review of that volume.

Overall, this book is good, but their 2005 volume "Not By Genes Alone" is better - and should be read first.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Islander

Can't judge a book by the cover.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 11, 2018

You can't judge a book by the cover, or more specifically, by the image of the cover on the Amazon web site.

Anthropology, psychology, economics, philosophy, archaeology, game theory..... all things I am interested in. But I don't want to obtain a PHD in statistics to get through Part 1.

This may be the most influential book in it's field in history, but it's strictly for professionals. Laymen, stay away. Get something by Jonathan Haidt.

Helpful

F. T. S. Kerstholt

Bridgeing natural and social sciences: the case of cultural evolution

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 6, 2006

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

26 people found this helpful

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