The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition Series) Kindle Edition

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

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.

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.

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