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.
Author(s): Stephen Boyd, Lieven Vandenberghe
Series: Evolution and Cognition
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 465
Tags: Антропология;Социальная (культурная) антропология;
Aknowledgments......Page 6
Introduction......Page 12
PART 1 The Evolution of
Social Learning......Page 22
Social Learning as an Adaptation......Page 28
Why Does Culture Increase Human Adaptability?......Page 44
Why Culture Is Common, but Cultural Evolution Is Rare......Page 61
Climate, Culture, and the Evolution of Cognition......Page 75
Norms and Bounded Rationality......Page 92
PART 2 Etnic Groups and Markers......Page 108
The Evolution of Ethnic Markers......Page 112
Shared Norms and the Evolution of Ethnic Markers......Page 127
PART 3 Human Cooperation, Reciprocity, and Group Selection......Page 142
The Evolution of Reciprocity in Sizable Groups......Page 154
Punishment Allows the Evolution of Cooperation......Page 175
Why People Punish Defectors:......Page 198
Can Group-Functional Behaviors Evolve by Cultural GroupSelection?......Page 213
Group-Beneficial Norms Can Spread Rapidly in a StructuredPopulation......Page 236
The Evolution of Altruistic Punishment......Page 250
Cultural Evolution of Human Cooperation......Page 260
PART 4 Archaeology and Culture History......Page 292
How Microevolutionary Processes Give Rise to History......Page 296
Are Cultural Phylogenies Possible?......Page 319
Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatoryduring the Holocene?......Page 346
PART 5 Links to Other Disciplines......Page 384
Rationality, Imitation, and Tradition......Page 388
Simple Models of Complex Phenomena......Page 406
Memes: Universal Acid or a Better Mousetrap?......Page 429
Author Index......Page 446
Subject Index......Page 455
