Edited by Peter J. Richerson and Morten H. Christiansen
Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, however, has been hampered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. To remedy this, in this volume leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history, and economics come together to explore the central role of cultural evolution in different aspects of human endeavor. The contributors take as their guiding principle the idea that cultural evolution can provide an important integrating function across the various disciplines of the human sciences, as organic evolution does for biology. The benefits of adopting a cultural evolutionary perspective are demonstrated by contributions on social systems, technology, language, and religion. Topics covered include enforcement of norms in human groups, the neuroscience of technology, language diversity, and prosociality and religion. The contributors evaluate current research on cultural evolution and consider its broader theoretical and practical implications, synthesizing past and ongoing work and sketching a roadmap for future cross-disciplinary efforts.
ISBN: 9780262019750
Photographie: U. Dettmar
Lektorat: BerlinScienceWorks
Additional support is gratefully acknowledged from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Science Foundation).
“This ambitious and wide-ranging collection provides challenging theoretical discussions of the mechanisms of cultural evolution, including its complex relationship with biological evolution. It includes some comprehensive and reliable surveys of the current state of knowledge in four relevant domains—social structure, technology, language, and religion—that do not shirk from identifying unsolved problems. It is thus a promising basis on which the ongoing study of cultural evolution can proceed.”
Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh
“Cultural evolutionary studies explore selection, change, transmission, and inheritance in a variety of settings, including social systems, technology, language, and religion. Do such studies offer an integrated perspective capable of making sense of such superficially diverse phenomena? What kinds of models are required, and how can we distinguish the good ones from the bad? This volume provides a perfect window onto these important debates. A must-read for anyone interested in the scientific study of human behavior.”