The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. Evolution and Coognition.

Lediglich die Broschur ist leicht berieben und besto�n. Sonst aber ein gutes und sauberes Exemplar/ Only the dust jacket is rubbed and slightly bumped. But otherwise a good and clean copy. - Over the past 25 years, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson have become well known across a wide range of disciplines for their pathbreaking work on evolution and culture. This volume collects twenty of the influential but relatively inaccessible published articles that form the backbone of this research. The essays�which were published in a diverse set of journals and which are not easily available�are conceptually linked and form a cohesive, unified evolutionary account of human culture. Their interdisciplinary research is based on two notions. First, culture is crucial for understanding human behavior: unlike with other organisms, socially transmitted beliefs, attitudes, and values heavily influence our behavior. Second, 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. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Robert Boyd is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Peter J. Richerson is Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. Contents: PART 1: THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL LEARNING Social Learning as an Adaptation 2: 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 Croups 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 251 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 1 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 18: Rationality, Imitation, and Tradition 19: Simple Models of Complex Phenomena: The Case of Cultural Evolution Memes: Universal Acid or a Better Mousetrap?. ISBN 9780195181456