The origin and evolution of cultures / Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson.

Includes bibliographical references at chapter ends, and indexes.

Part 1: The evolution of social learning ; Social learning as an adaptation -- Why does culture increase human adaptability? -- Why culture is common, but cultural evolution is rare -- Climate, culture, and the evolution of cognition -- Norms and bounded rationality -- Part 2: Ethnic groups and markers ; The evolution of ethnic markers -- Shared norms and the evolution of ethnic markers / with Richard McElreath -- Part 3: Human cooperation, reciprocity, and group selection ; The evolution of reciprocity in sizable groups -- Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups -- Why people punish defectors : weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas / with Joseph Henrich -- Can group-functional behaviors evolve by cultural group selection? an empirical test / with Joseph Soltis -- Group-beneficial norms can spread rapidly in a structured population -- The evolution of altruistic punishment / with Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles -- Cultural evolution of human cooperation / with Joseph Henrich -- Part 4: Archaeology and culture history ; How microevolutionary processes give rise to history -- Are cultural phylogenies possible? / with Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and William H. Durham -- Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? a climate change hypothesis / with Robert L. Bettinger -- Part 5: Links to other disciplines -- Rationality, imitation, and tradition -- Simple models of complex phenomena : the case of cultural evolution -- Memes : universal acid or a better mousetrap?

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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