The Origin and Evolution of Cultures by Boyd

The Origin and Evolution of Cultures by Boyd

Over the past 25 years, Boyd and Richerson have become well-known across a wide range of disciplines for their path-breaking work on evolution and culture. This work collects twenty of the influential but relatively inaccessible published articels that form the backbone of this research. It could not be more timely given the growing influence of evolutionary psychology. The papers - which were published in a diverse set of journals and which are not easily available - a conceptually linked and form a cohesive, unified evolutionary account of human culture. Their interdisciplinary research is based on two notions. First, that culture is crucial for understanding human behavior: unlike other organism, 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. Taking off from these two assumptions, Boyd and Richerson's novel idea is that culture is a pool of information, stored in the brains of a population, that gets transmitted from one brain to another by social learning processes. Among their conclusions: culture can account for both our astounding ecological success as well as the maladaptations that characterize much of human behavior. Interest in Boyd and Richerson's work spans anthropology, psychology, economics, philosophy, and political science, and has influenced work on animal behavior, economics and game theory, memes, and even archaeology.

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 laudableMany professional anthrologists, biologists, philosophers and psychologists interested in the study of culture and the evolution of mind and behavior will benefit from it. * Metapsychology *

Peter J.Richerson is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, as well as a Visiting Professor at University College London's Institute of Archaeology. Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Changed Human Evolution is his book. Morten H.Christiansen is a professor of psychology and the codirector of Cornell University's Cognitive Science Program.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780195181456
ISBN 10	019518145X
Title	The Origin and Evolution of Cultures
Author	Boyd
Series	Evolution And Cognition Series
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press Inc
Year published	2005-02-10
Number of pages	464
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.