Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

by Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd

Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal's. In this stunning exploration of human adaptation, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that only a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can explain these unique characteristics.

Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Richerson and Boyd illustrate here that culture is neither superorganic nor the handmaiden of the genes. Rather, it is essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion. Drawing on work in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, and economics—and building their case with such fascinating examples as kayaks, corporations, clever knots, and yams that require twelve men to carry them—Richerson and Boyd convincingly demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked, and they show us how to think about their interaction in a way that yields a richer understanding of human nature.

In abandoning the nature-versus-nurture debate as fundamentally misconceived, Not by Genes Alone is a truly original and groundbreaking theory of the role of culture in evolution and a book to be reckoned with for generations to come.

“I continue to be surprised by the number of educated people (many of them biologists) who think that offering explanations for human behavior in terms of culture somehow disproves the suggestion that human behavior can be explained in Darwinian evolutionary terms. Fortunately, we now have a book to which they may be directed for enlightenment . . . . It is a book full of good sense and the kinds of intellectual rigor and clarity of writing that we have come to expect from the Boyd/Richerson stable.”—Robin Dunbar, Nature

“ Not by Genes Alone is a valuable and very readable synthesis of a still embryonic but very important subject straddling the sciences and humanities.”—E. O. Wilson, Harvard University

Genres: Science, Evolution, Nonfiction, Biology, Anthropology, Cultural, Psychology

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Bastian Greshake Tzovaras · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phew, yet another book I found fun to read but hard to review.

I was introduced to (biological & cultural) evolution and sociobiology through Dawkins and my HS biology teacher about 10 years back & it turned me in some kind of adolescent [read: know-it-all] version of Darwin's Bulldog for some time. Sorry for everyone who had to endure me during that period (I guess amongst others Philipp also had to suffer from that when we started our undergrad studies).

So in a way many things introduced in the book weren't exactly new to me. But I found the book to be a pretty nice summary of all the different fields and issues that cultural evolution touches and looking from a biologists point of view I found that they make a convincing case for a holistic perspective on how to study how biological & cultural evolution interact and co-evolve. Having said that: I'm not too sure who should be the audience for this book. The brief summaries on e.g. kin selection, etc. worked fine for me, though I'm not too sure whether this will work for people who are approaching the topic more from the cultural side of things with maybe a bit less general knowledge of evolutionary biology.

Again from the evolutionary biology side of thing I feel they approached the issue of adaptationist thinking and the just-so-storytelling of evolutionary psychology in a sensible way (esp. given that it was published in 2006): Having plausible stories to tell with your data is the way evolutionary biology often has to work, given that it's hard to perform experiments (Lenski's LTEE and alike notwithstanding). But there's only so much story that your data can support before you leave science and enter the realm of novel writing.

To summarize: I guess if you're looking for a primer on cultural evolution this may work fine, though I feel you should bring at least some knowledge of (strict) biological evolution to get the most out of it.

[Katja · Rating 1 out of 5]

I cannot think of any idea from this book that would be little more than pure common sense. Many examples are dispensable given that the point is clear even without examples. The overall conclusion is "things are not that simple" which is, again, little more than expected.

[Cheryl]

Slogged through about 4/7 of this (the first half, the last chapter lightly). Despite the fact that the authors kept saying 'intuition is wrong' everything I could manage to glean did sound like common sense. They kept defining terminology, but not in a way that I could make sense of. The nits they picked seemed like imaginary ones to me....

I mean, does anyone really say otherwise than what they claim (by chapter titles) that culture is essential, exists, evolves, is an adaptation, is maladaptive, and coevolves with genes? The last chapter, "Nothing about culture makes sense except in the light of evolution" could be seen to be a little bit provocative given it's apparent contrast with the title of the book, but to me everything seemed to be only a trivial matter of ivory tower semantic BS.

I guess academia does tend to create specialists, and any prof. who thinks beyond the confines of his or niche thinks that their thoughts are revolutionary. However, if the authors read popular science, or literature, or looked around the world at real people, they'd realize that no matter what fancy words you use to frame it, the question remains the same. How do nature and nurture interact upon each other, the individual, the population, the species, and (what this book apparently didn't consider) the world?

And ultimately that's all Richerson and Boyd apparently did. They defined the question, using analyses of field work and experience from mostly other researchers, and justified it. But they didn't even attempt an answer; every guess they made they qualified with "more study needed."

I did use one book dart, which perfectly illustrates the authors' tendency to hazard guesses:
"Little Phyllis apparently abhors Democrats partly because she inherited genes from her parents that predispose her to adopt conservative views...."

[Otto Lehto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not By Genes Alone does not succeed by innovation alone. It draws from a century of models in Darwinian population dynamics (especially the Price equation) and preceding models of cultural evolution in anthropology, economics, and sociobiology. Most of what is in the book is only a refinement of what came before. The book is therefore a hilariously self-referential example of the type of cultural transmission that the book is all about: the biased transmission and refinement of existing cultural artefacts through imitation and innovation. And there is nothing wrong with that; this is how science works.

Through a creative application of mathematical models and literary explanations, the authors present a compelling Darwinian model for cultural evolution. The end product is a more satisfactory variety of Darwinism than the rudimentary science of "Memetics" (Dawkins, Dennett, Blackmore). Richerson & Boyd do not depend upon the assumption that units of cultural transmission are strictly analogous to genes. They show that the units of cultural replication and transmission do not need to have in theory, and rarely do have in practice, all the characters of longevity, fecundity, and copy-fidelity that Dawkins ascribed to all effective Darwinian replicators. Their models operate on level of population dynamics and not on the level of individual selection per se. They also embrace multi-level (or group) selection.

At the same time, although there is a tension between the Dawkinsian "memetic" variety of cultural evolution and the Richerson-Boyd variety of cultural evolution, these differences should not be exaggerated. I believe we are now at a point where the synthetic science of cultural evolution, which also includes socioeconomic evolution, should be incorporated into the broader Darwinian theory. As the authors readily admit, the similarities are much stronger than the differences, and the mathematics produces rather similar results regardless of which theory you embrace. Applying the logic of cultural innovation, selection, and transmission to the study of human societies is a much-needed shift in the social sciences that rightfully completes the Darwinian project (as David Sloan Wilson has recently argued in his provocative book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution and as E.O. Wilson already argued in his Sociobiology: The New Synthesis).

The biggest achievement of the book is its reformist restatement and re-articulation of the importance of Darwinian mathematics and reasoning to the study of cultural evolution. The worst that can be said about the book is that it operates on such level of generality, and it relies on so much established knowledge, that it cannot be considered a scientific breakthrough. Nonetheless, it achieves what it sets out to do. It should also be celebrated for its delightfully readable and entertaining prose. It will not win any awards for lyricism - that is Richard Dawkins's gig - but it makes complicated ideas simple enough for undergraduates, (bright) high school students, and educated lay readers to understand. It is very easy to recommend a book that has such a compelling argument that is elongated and elaborated with such effortless glee and determination.

[Jim Heter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cultural Evolution...

I bought this Kindle book some time ago, then stopped reading it as it seemed not to be what I was expecting.
The other day I noticed it on my reader and decided I should give it another go. Glad I did. Surprised to learn that the authors feel their subject is under-appreciated. Maybe it's just too easy to think "well of course" and presume no further thought is needed. Not so simple. We have culture. We don't really know how we managed to acquire it. Or how it works.
We'd be better off if we did. It explains why we walk to the drum we hear, and why others hear different ones.

[Alvaro de Menard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read it because I was curious to see if there was anything in B&R that was not in Henrich. There are some interesting differences: while Henrich is rather triumphalist, B&R take a much more skeptical view of cultural evolution (a Nietzschean perspective, though of course they don't cite him). Unfortunately most of the book is bogged down by a series of dull arguments against various opponents of cultural evolution. My recommendation would be to read The Secret of our Success, then read just chapter 5 ("Culture is Maladaptive") in this one.

[Maher Razouk · Rating 5 out of 5]

ثقافة الشرف
.
.
لطالما كان الجنوب الأمريكي أكثر عنفًا من الشمال. هذا ما تؤكده الأوصاف الملونة للمبارزات والخلافات والقرصنة في الأدغال والإعدام خارج نطاق القانون بشكل بارز في حسابات الزوار ومقالات الصحف والسير الذاتية من القرن الثامن عشر فصاعدًا. الإحصائيات تثبت هذه الانطباعات. على سبيل المثال ، خلال الفترة 1865-1915 ، كان معدل جرائم القتل في الجنوب عشرة أضعاف المعدل الحالي في الولايات المتحدة بأكملها ، ومرتين المعدل في أكثر مدننا عنفًا. إحصائيات القتل الحديثة تروي نفس القصة.

يجادل عالما النفس «ريتشارد نيسبت» و«دوف كوهين» في كتابهما : (ثقافة الشرف) ، بأن الجنوب أكثر عنفًا من الشمال لأن سكان الجنوب لديهم معتقدات ثقافية حول الشرف الشخصي تختلف عن نظرائهم في الشمال. وهم يجادلون بأن الجنوبيين يعتقدون بقوة أكثر من الشماليين أن سمعة الشخص مهمة وتستحق الدفاع عنها حتى بتكلفة باهظة. نتيجة لذلك ، غالبًا ما تتصاعد الحجج والمواجهات التي تؤدي إلى كلمات قاسية أو مشاجرات بسيطة ثم إلى عنف مميت .

ما الذي يمكن أن يفسر هذه الاختلافات؟ يمكن لبعض سمات البيئة الجنوبية ، مثل دفئها الأكبر ، أن يفسر سبب كون الجنوبيين أكثر عنفًا. مثل هذه الفرضيات معقولة ، ويجد نيسبيت وكوهين صعوبة في اختبارها. قد يختلف الشماليون والجنوبيون وراثيًا ، لكن هذه الفرضية ليست معقولة جدًا. جاء المستوطنون في الشمال والجنوب في الغالب من الجزر البريطانية والمناطق المجاورة في شمال غرب أوروبا . السكان البشريون مختلطون جيدًا على المستوى الجيني .
يدعم نيسبت وكوهين فرضيتهما بمجموعة رائعة من الأدلة. لنبدأ بالأنماط الإحصائية للعنف. في المناطق الريفية والبلدات الصغيرة الجنوبية ، ترتفع معدلات القتل بالنسبة للجدل بين الأصدقاء والمعارف ، ولكن ليس لعمليات القتل المرتكبة في سياق جنايات أخرى.

بعبارة أخرى ، الرجال في الجنوب هم أكثر عرضة من الشماليين لقتل أحد معارفهم عندما تندلع مشادة في حانة ، لكنهم ليسوا أكثر عرضة لقتل الرجل الذي يقف خلف المنضدة عندما يدخلون محل لبيع الخمور. وبالتالي ، يبدو أن الجنوبيين أكثر عنفًا من الأمريكيين الآخرين فقط في المواقف التي تنطوي على الشرف الشخصي. الفرضيات المتنافسة لا تعمل بشكل جيد: لا لون البشرة ولا المناخ الحار ولا تاريخ العبودية يفسر هذا الاختلاف في جرائم القتل.
الاختلافات في ما يقوله الناس عن العنف تدعم فرضية "ثقافة الشرف".
.
Peter J. Richerson
Not By Genes Alone
Translated By #Maher_Razouk

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richerson maintains an argumentative stance throughout this book. Since his thesis is that culture has--and is--as important to human evolution as genes are, a hypothesis I've never heard denied, his confrontational tone is hard to understand.

Culture can adapt more rapidly than genetic mutation, so it explains how humans have adapted so they can occupy the wide range of environments they do. it also explains why severe climactic shifts like the Ice Age were actually an impetus to human development.

Richerson claims that no other mammal imitates as much as humans do, even chimps and other apes. He goes so far as to say that a chimp is as smart as a child, but the chimp doesn't imitate as much.. That is absurd. A chimp brain is at least 1/3 the size of a human brain.

He does note that there had be changes in hominin genes that not only predisposed imitation of adaptive innovations, but also allowed imitation. Before hominins could make tools at all, they had to have had mutated genes that allowed them to make rapid serial motions towards a desired end. Since the development of language depends on the same mutation, it is easy to see why such a mutation enhanced the survival of those who had it.

Although language and tool making required genetic mutations, neither a specific language nor a specific tool was dictated by genes. Babies are born with the ability to learn any languages they're exposed to. What they do when they are acquiring language, nobody could teach them. 18 month olders are figuring out what sounds are phonemes and what are allophones. Not only could their parents not teach this, they aren't conscious of using allophones unless they had studied linguistics. It must be emphasized that no two languages have the same phonemic systems. What is an allophone in one language can be a phoneme in another, and vice versa. That languages have allophones and phonemes is part of our genetic makeup, but the specific sounds a language uses is culturally determined.

Anyone who has had children knows they don't just imitate. They mispronounce all the time and they make grammatical errors they couldn't have heard like "goed" and lexical errors like "broomed" Richerson ignores such limitations on imitation. He ignores that there may be genetic templates underlying learning and that people have the ability not only to imitate but to analyze, judge and innovate. Imitation alone leads to stasis.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

My modest expectations for this book were considerably surpassed. The authors' argument is that humanity differs from all other species in that various forms of cultural selection stood alongside natural selection to determine the evolution of our species. Sometimes cultural selection can even overrule natural selection, leading to maladaptations such as modernity's declining birthrates. Far from a bland nature/nurture discussion, this book offers a logically rigorous, cumulative case that culture makes sense only in the light of evolution and that human evolution makes sense only in the light of culture. In so doing, it opens up new vistas for interdisciplinary work on what it means to be human.

The argument is nuanced, requiring careful attention from the reader. The authors often work hard to distinguish their position from what may look to the non-specialist (such as myself) like very similar positions. This requires the reader to work hard as well. Yet this challenging feature is what makes the book so valuable as a scientific argument. The authors are mostly successful in using thought experiments and examples to explain systems. They also inject bits of humor. Personally, I found their use of the first-person plural amusing, almost a throwback to early modern forms of writing: "We think it best..."

This book is a bit more difficult than the average popular science book. Nevertheless, I think non-academics with interest in the fields could read and profit from it. Its bold claims and measured arguments have certainly advanced the scholarly conversation.

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is like a thin window overlooking a beautiful landscape, which the authors felt they could improve through exaggerated window dressing. At its heart are a few valuable ideas and a cogent argument: biology is the foundation of culture and influences culture, but culture is distinct from biology; culture fills in the gaps for what genes can't do (like adapt to new environments quickly); and culture competes accordingly to evolutionary processes. The window dressing on these provocative ideas are 255 pages of pedantic and seemingly random ethnographic, sociological, and psychological reports and anecdotes. The tone is often overly casual, as if listening to the authors agree with one another in a university office, sneakered feet up on desks. Many of the supporting examples seem not only superfluous, but even misleading, especially the poor examples of consilience near the end of the book. I would have loved a book on this topic more thoughtfully assembled or scrupulously edited.

[Brigid · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really good book - it comes up with an interesting way of integrating culture and evolution, instead of acting as though one or the other doesn't exist. The style is a bit chatty, but the authors are trying to make it readable, which is a nice change for academics. While they advocate for their theory, they don't pretend at any point that they have the final answer, which I greatly appreciated, and the arguments that they make resonate well with common sense.

[Per Kraulis · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and provocative argument that culture has influenced human evolution since one million years. The authors propose that the variable climate of the Pleistocene provided the conditions for favoring culture in pre-humans, since it allowed our ancestors to adapt more quickly than genetic evolution would have allowed.
However one views that argument, I think that their (partly) independent argument about the importance of culture in human history is solid. The fundamental observation is that cultural evolution affected human genetic evolution in the long term, and the development of different forms of society in the short term. The authors also propose that modern global society is a "giant field experiment in which the social instincts adapted to smaller-scale societies are subjected to a wide range of new environmental conditions."
They make an interesting observation that "social innovations that make large-scale society possible, but at the same time effectively simulate life in a tribal-scale society, will tend to spread." This was written before Facebook became a global phenomenon.

[Jukka Aakula · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic of the cultural evolution

[Designated Hysteric · Rating 3 out of 5]

CULTURE


Essential

2 main points:
- Culture is crucial for understanding human behavior.
- Culture is part of biology.

"Population thinking is the core of the theory of culture we defend in this book. First of all, let's be clear about what we mean by culture:
Culture is information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.
By information we mean any kind of mental state, conscious or not, that is acquired or modified by social learning and affects behavior."

"Taking a population approach does not imply that cultural evolution is closely analogous to genetic evolution. For example, population thinking that does not require cultural information takes the form of memes, discrete, faithfully replicating, genelike bits of information.
…
Culture is interesting and important because its evolutionary behavior is distinctly different from that of genes. For example, we will argue that the human cultural system arose as an adaptation, because it can evolve fancy adaptations to changing environments rather more swiftly than is possible by genes alone. Culture would never have evolved unless it could do things that genes can't!"

"Every bit of the behavior (or physiology or morphology, for that matter) of every single organism living on the face of the earth results from the interaction of genetic information stored in the developing organism and the properties of its environment."
"Thus, culture is neither nature nor nurture, but some of both. It combines inheritance and learning in a way that cannot be parsed into genes or environment.16"

"Thinking about the population properties of culture helps us understand the psychology of social learning. For example, we will see that selection can favor a psychology that causes people to conform to the majority behavior even though this mechanism sometimes prevents populations from adapting to a change in the environment. Evolution also favors a psychology that makes people more prone to imitate prestigious individuals and individuals who are like themselves even though this habit can easily result in maladaptive fads. These psychological mechanisms in turn give rise to important patterns of behavior, like the symbolic marking of social groups that would not evolve unless their culture had certain population level consequences."


Exists

"The main purpose of this chapter is to convince the skeptics that culture is necessary, and to show that variation in human behavior cannot be understood without accounting for beliefs, values, and other socially acquired determinants of behavior. Those who would deny a role for culture place the entire burden of explaining human diversity on some mix of genetic and environmental variation-but neither genetic nor environmental differences can bear the explanatory weight this approach places on them. The evidence accords better with the traditional views of cultural anthropologists and kindred thinkers in other disciplines: heritable cultural differences are crucial for understanding human behavior."

"We submit that the following examples provide as strong evidence that some transmitted factor-culture, genes, or transmitted environment plays an important role in shaping human societies. Then we will present evidence that neither genes nor transmissible environment is likely to be sufficient to explain the variation between human societies, leaving culture as the most likely suspect."


Evolves

"The Darwinian theory of cultural evolution is an account of how such processes cause populations to come to have the culture they have.
The Darwinian theory of culture presented here emphasizes the generic properties of different types of processes. For example, some cultural variants may be easier to learn and remember than others, and this will, all other things being equal, cause such variants to spread, a process we call biased transmission. The basic kinds of processes are the forces of cultural evolution, analogous to the forces of genetic evolution, selection, mutation, and drift. In any particular situation, the concrete events in the lives of real people are what really goes on. However, by collecting similar processes together, and working out their generic properties, we build a handy conceptual tool kit that makes it easier to compare and generalize across cases. While we make no pretense that our scheme is a finished and final account, we do think that the tools in hand are useful for understanding how culture evolves."

"We call the processes that cause the culture to change forces of cultural evolution. We divide the evolving system into two parts. One is the "inertial" part-the processes that tend to keep the population the same from one time period to the next. In this model cultural inertia comes from unbiased sampling and faithful copying of models. The other part consists of the forces-the processes that cause changes in the numbers of different types of cultural variants in the population. These processes overcome the inertia and generate evolutionary change.19"

"Biased cultural transmission occurs when people preferentially adopt some cultural variants rather than others. Think of it as comparison shopping. People are exposed to alternative ideas or values and then choose among them (although the choice may not be a conscious one).20 The diffusion of innovations provides a fund of well-studied examples of how biased transmission works."

"The logic of natural selection applies to culturally transmitted variation every bit as much as it applies to genetic variation. For natural selection on culture to occur,
• people must vary because they have acquired different beliefs or values through social learning,
• this variation must affect people's behavior in ways that affect the probability that they transmit their beliefs to others, and
• the total number of cultural variants that can exist in the population must be limited in some way.
Or, in other words, cultural variants must compete."

"Why distinguish selection and biased transmission?
Biased transmission occurs because people preferentially adopt some cultural variants rather than others, while selection occurs because some cultural variants affect the lives of their bearers in ways that make those bearers more likely to be imitated. Almost every other author who has written about this topic, including biologists Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus Feldman, and Richard Dawkins, and anthropologist William Durham,36 describes biased transmission as a form of selection, often using the term cultural selection. This is not unreasonable - biased transmission is a process of selective retention. Human populations are culturally variable. Some variants are more likely to be imitated than others, and thus some variants have higher relative "cultural fitness."
Nonetheless, we think that distinguishing between biased transmission and natural selection is very important. Biased transmission depends on what is going on in the brains of imitators, but in most forms of natural selection, the fitness of different genes depends on their effect on survival and reproduction, independent of human desires, choices, and preferences."

"Population thinking helps explain variation in cultural coherence
That cultures are not made up of independently evolving bits but composed of at least partly integrated complexes of beliefs and values is not an embarrassment for the Darwinian approach. Quite to the contrary, population-based evolutionary theory has tools to help us think clearly about the degree, pattern, and process of integration. What we mean by integration here is that the various components of a particular aspect of culture covary in space or time for particular reasons. Because a population-based theory of culture focuses on patterns of variation, it also provides a natural framework to describe patterns of integration."


Why bother with the models?

"Instead, these very same biologists typically have a love of simple explanatory models. What gives? The answer is that such explanatory models are not laws but tools to be taken up or not as the situation warrants. Good models are like good tools: they are known to do a certain job reasonably well. Simple models that work well for a wide variety of jobs are an especially valuable part of the biologist's tool kit.
Having a toolbox filled with such models brings three important benefits.

First, it is economical.
Second, simple models provide islands of conceptual clarity in the midst of otherwise mind-numbing complexity and diversity.
Third, by using a standardized conceptual tool kit, we increase the chance that we will detect useful generalizations in spite of the complexity and diversity of human behavior."

"We are advocating that social scientists change the way they do business, supplementing their usual tool kit with ideas imported from biology."

"The basic steps of Darwinian analysis are
• draw up a model of the life history of individuals;
• fit an individual-level model of the cultural (and genetic, if relevant) transmission processes to the life history;
• decide which cultural (and genetic) variants to consider;
• fit an individual-level model of the ecological effects to the life history and to the variants;
• scale up by embedding the individual-level processes in a population; and
• extend over time by iterating the one-generation model generation after generation."


Adaptive

"Conclusion: Why is human culture such an extraordinarily successful adaptation?
If we are right, culture is adaptive because it can do things that genes cannot do for themselves. Simple forms of social learning cut the cost of individual learning by allowing individuals to use environmental cues selectively. If you can easily figure out what to do, do it! But if not, you can fall back on copying what others do. When environments are variable and the learning is difficult or costly, such a system can be a big advantage, and most likely explains the relatively crude systems of social learning commonly found in social animals. Humans have evolved the additional capacity to acquire variant traditions by imitation and teaching, and can accurately, quickly, and selectively acquire the most common variant or the variants used by the successful. When these kinds of social learning biases are combined with occasional adaptive innovations and content biases, the result is the cumulative cultural evolution of complex, socially learned adaptations, adaptations that are far beyond the creative ability of any individual. Because cumulative cultural evolution gives rise to complex adaptations much more rapidly than natural selection can give rise to genetic adaptations, complex culture was particularly suited to the highly variable Pleistocene environments. As a consequence, humans eventually became one of the most successful species of the Pleistocene large mammal fauna.100"


Maladaptive

"We think that the big-mistake hypothesis is cogent, but we doubt that it is the cause of most modern maladaptations. In this chapter, we will make the case that much human maladaptation is an unavoidable byproduct of cumulative cultural adaptation. Acquiring information from others allows people to rapidly adapt to a wide range of environments, but it also opens a portal into people's brains, through which maladaptive ideas can enter-ideas whose content makes them more likely to spread, but do not increase the genetic fitness of their bearers."

"Four interrelated tradeoffs conspire to weaken the grip of genetically determined biases on cultural evolution. First, people other than parents are a crucial source of adaptive information. Second, content biases cannot be made too restrictive without becoming too costly or sacrificing the adaptive flexibility that social learning provides. Next, fast and frugal adaptive heuristics such as conformist and prestige biases have specific, unavoidable, maladaptive side effects. Finally, rogue cultural variants evolve devious strategies to evade the effects of content biases. Because the rate of cultural adaptation is rapid compared with genetic evolution, rogue variants will often win arms races with genes."

"For the same reason that evolution cannot "design" a learning device that is both general purpose and powerful, selection cannot shape social learning mechanisms so that they reliably reject maladaptive beliefs over the whole range of human experience.
…
As a result, we may often adopt maladaptive behaviors if population-level processes like selection on non parenterally transmitted variation have somehow favored them."

Much human psychology relies on clever but simple heuristics for managing cultural transmission. Culture, then, is a sophisticated cognitive and social system system evolved to finesse the problem that information costs preclude a general-purpose, problem-solving system inside every individual's head. The scientific enterprise itself is the ultimate example of culture's capacity to solve extraordinarily difficult problems. Given the right social institutions, quite fallible individual intellects can gradually reveal the deepest secrets of the universe.42 The price we pay for our promiscuous lust for adaptive information is playing host to sometimes spectacularly pathological cultural variants."

"In this chapter, we have argued that cultural maladaptations arise from a design tradeoff. Culture allows rapid adaptation to a wide range of environments, but leads to systematic maladaptation as a result."


Culture and Genes coevolve

"Conclusion: Coevolution weaves cultural and genetic causes into a single cloth
The main point of this chapter is that the cultural part of the gene-culture coevolutionary processes has played an important role in the evolution of human social institutions. In the short run, cultural evolution, partly driven by ancient and tribal social instincts and partly by selection among culturally variable groups, gave rise to the institutions we observe. In the longer run, cultural evolutionary processes created an environment that led to the evolution of uniquely human social instincts.
This hypothesis provides a theoretically coherent account of the evolution of complex human societies, and is consistent with much empirical evidence. It explains the undeniable elements of functional design in human social institutions and the manifest crudity of complex societies in the same theoretical framework. Without the ancient social instincts, we can't explain the many features of our social systems that we share with other primates. Without the tribal social instincts, we can't explain why our societies are so different from those of other primates, the emotional salience of tribal-scale human groups, or their importance in social organization and social conflict. The social instincts of both sorts, acting as biases shaping evolution of social institutions, account for the peculiar form of human societies, for the timescales over which institutions evolve, and for the patterns of conflict that routinely plague human societies. The institutions of complex societies are manifestly built on ancient and tribal instincts and have predictable imperfections deriving from cultural evolutionary processes."


Conclusion

"In this book, we have made the case for using Darwinian methods to understand cultural evolution. Culture is stored in populations, so understanding human brains and how populations change requires population thinking. Darwinian accounts are one part bookkeeping-a quantitative description of cultural variation and its change through time. In addition, they are one part quantitative budget analysis-a systematic attribution of changes to causal processes. If you are going to study cultural evolution in a serious way, you are going to be driven to Darwinian methods of analysis. You have to be able to describe change and you have to be able to account for change. Several research programs in social sciences have independently converged on the Darwinian methods. The sociolinguists' microevolutionary studies of dialect evolution are a particularly sophisticated example; elsewhere we note others.32"

"Scientific methods are a lot like Zen meditation-arduous and exacting practices that allow the practitioner to win some lovely, if fragile and fallible, truths, eyeball to eyeball with the great mystery. Scratch many a scientist, and a nature mystic bleeds. We feel so about our subject. Peoples and their cultures are wondrous and diverse. The study of human diversity highlights how much humanity we share with the most exotic of our fellows"

"Mathematical models are, as we have said, deliberately shorn of all the rich detail that makes people themselves so interesting. Foolish indeed are the mathematical modelers who confuse their abstractions with reality. But when used properly, mathematics schools our intuition in ways that no other technique can. It is a form of meditation upon nature without peer. We are constantly struck by the way our naive intuitions are confounded and then rebuilt along new lines by the results of models. Bit by bit, models can be used to dissect the logic of complex systems. The sharp contrast between the difficulty of making good models and their manifest simplicity compared to the phenomena they seek to understand is a humbling, even spiritual, experience."

"A good set of data also is a beautiful thing to behold. Foolish, of course, is the empiricist who thinks that even the most beautiful set of data captures any complex phenomenon completely, especially one who thinks that the data from his own case applies without exception to a diverse system such as human culture.4 However, data are the ultimate arbiter. More than just testing hypotheses, data often start us thinking in the first place."

[Ryan Chynces · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's ok. it was easy to lose sight of the overall argument of the book and it was a struggle to finish it. but i'm still glad i read it.

[Tomas Kristofory · Rating 5 out of 5]

If once cultural evolution enters textbooks, it will be thanks to this book. Fantastic.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

CULTURE IS ESSENTIAL: Culture is crucial for understanding human behaviour; people acquire beliefs and values from the people around them, and you can’t explain human behaviour without taking this reality into account. Culturally acquired ideas are crucially important for explaining a wide range of human behaviour - opinions, beliefs, and attitudes, habits of thought, language, artistic styles, tools and technology, and social rules and political institutions. Culture is part of biology. We have an evolved psychology that shapes what we learn and how we think, and this in turn influences the kind of beliefs and attitudes that spread and persist. Over the evolutionary longhaul, culture has shaped our innate psychology as much as the other way around. Culture cannot be understood without population thinking. Darwin saw that species were populations of organisms that carried a variable pool of inherited information through time. To explain the properties of a species, biologists had to understand how individual events shape this pool of information, causing some variant members of the species to persist and spread, and others to diminish. Definition of culture: information capable of affecting individuals’ behaviour that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission. People in culturally distinct groups behave differently, mostly because they have acquired different skills, beliefs, and values, and these differences persist because the people of one generation acquire their beliefs and atittudes from those around them. Population thinking is the key to building a causal account of cultural evolution. We are largely what our genes and our culture make us. A sensible theory of cultural evolution will have to explain why some beliefs and attitudes spread and persist while others disappear. Superorganicism is the view that biology furnishes the blank slate on which culture and personal experience write. But this is wrong because it ignores the rich interconnections between culture and other aspects of our behaviour and anatomy. Culture is as much a part of human biology as walking upright; culture-making brains are the product of more than two million years of more or less gradual increases in brain size and cultural complexity. Further, to ask whether behaviour is determined by genes or environment does not make sense. Genes aren’t blueprints that specify the adult properties of the organism. A better analogy is that genes are like a recipe, but one in which the ingredients, cooking temperature, and so on are set by the environment. In the natural world, proximate causes are typically physiological; birds migrate toward the equator when days shorten because their brain converts changes in day length to hormonal signals that activate migratory behaviour. Ultimate causes are evolutionary; migration is an evolved straegy to exploit the favorable season at higher latitude while passing the harsh winter in less demanding habitats. Natural selection acting on culture is an ultimate cause of human behaviour, just like natural selection acting on genes. The norms and values that predominate in a group plausibly affect the probability that the group is successful, whether it survives, and whether it expands. Suppose that groups having norms that promote group solidarity are more likely to survive than groups lacking this sentiment. This creates a selective pressure that leads to the spread of solidarity. This process may be opposed by an evolved innate psychology that biases what we learn from others, making us more prone to imitate and invent selfish or nepotistic beliefs rather than ones favouring group solidarity.

CULTURE EXISTS: The main purpose of this chapter is to convince the skeptics that culture is necessary, and to show that variation in human behaviour cannot be understood without accounting for beliefs, values and other socially acquired determinants of behaviour. Heritable cultural differences are crucial for understanding human behaviour. Cultural differences account for much human variation; three things could act as proximate causes of this variation.
First, people could have different genes.
Second, genetically similar individuals could live in different environments.
Thirdly, people could have acquired different beliefs, values, and skills; they could have different cultures.
If you move a population into a new territory, will their social structure resemble their new neighbours, or will it be closer to the structure of their ancestors in their ancestral land? The Midwest in America: people from different ethnic backgrounds have dissimilar beliefs about farming and family. Freiburg was full of Germans and Libertyville was full of Yankees. The Germans value farming as a way of life, and they want one son to carry on the family tradition. The Yankees regard their farms as profit-making businesses; they buy and rent land depending on economic conditions, and if the price is right; they sell. This difference leads to different farming practices. Germans are conservative, mainly farming the land they own, while Yankee farmers aggressively expand their operations by renting. In other words, people having different cultural and institutional histories will behave differently in the same environment. Many important differences between human groups result from conservative, transmissible determinants of behaviour - either culture, genes, or persistent institutional differences. This is not because people’s behaviour necessarily depends on the behaviour of others; culture can persist even when the chain of behaviour linking the past to the present is broken. A mere disruption of the overt expression of culture will often fail to erase it; cultures aren’t immutable, however, socialisation by parents can perpetuate substantial portions of a traditional culture in an extremely hostile and radically altered social environment. Two kinds of evidence show that much of teh behavioural differences among groups are not genetic; individual cross-cultural adoptees behave like members of their adopted culture, not the culture of their biological parents. And groups of people often change behaviour much more rapidly than natural selection could change gene frequencies.

- EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGISTS DOWNPLAY CULTURE: Cosmides and Tooby introduced the distinction between epidemiological culture - differences between people that result from different ideas or values acquired from the people around them - and evoked culture - differences that aren’t transmitted, but rather are evoked by the local environment. They believe that anthropologists and historians overestimate the former. They say that culture is not transmitted; rather, children make inferences by observing the behaviour of others, inferences that are constrained by their evolved psychology. They are surely right in stating that every form of learning requires an information-rich innate psychology, and that much of the adaptive complexity we see in cultures stems from this information. However, ignoring transmitted culture completely is a big mistake. The single most adaptive feature of culture is that it allows the gradual, cumulative assembly of adaptations over many generations that no single individual could evoke on his or her own. Cumulative cultural adaptation cannot be based directly on innate, genetically encoded information. There is another way some evolutionary psychologists downplay the role of culture: some think that complex cultural adaptations do not arise gradually and blindly as they do in genetic evolution. New symphonies don’t appear bit by bit as a consequence of the differential spread and elaboration of slightly better and better melodies. Rather they emerge from people’s minds and their functional complexity arises from the action of those minds. Thomas Huxley thought that the new adaptations arose in big jumps and then antural selection accepted or rejected these hopeful monsters; but this is wrong because the likelihood that a complex adaptation will arise by chance is vanishingly small. Individuals are smart, but most of the cultural artefacts that we use (languages, social institutions, etc) are far too complex for even the most gifted innovator to create from scratch. So to sum up, people are different, at least in part, because they acquired different beliefs, attitudes, and values from others. The difference between the range of human variation and that of other animals like baboons demands an evolutionary explanation. Ten million years ago, our ancestors were an apelike species; any theory that hopes to explain the behaviour of contemporary humans must tell us what it is that causes humans to be so variable in their behaviour, and why this was favoured by natural selection.

- CULTURE EVOLVES: we don’t mean to say that cultures progress in a unilinear fashion; species are populations of individuals that carry a pool of genetically acquired information through time; human populations carry a pool of culturally acquired information too, and in order to explain why particular cultures are as they are, we need to keep track of the processes that cause some cultural variants to spread and persist while others disappear. A Darwinian account of culture does not imply that culture must be divisible into tiny, independent genelike bits that are faithfully replicated. Culture is mostly information in brains, and gets transmitted from brain to brain by way of a variety of social learning processes. The vast store of information that exists in every culture must be encoded in some material object; the most important aspects of culture are those stored in our heads. Cultural variant is simply the information stored in people’s heads (memes). What all social learning have in common is that information in one person’s brain generates some behaviour that gives rise to information in a second person’s brain that generates a similar behaviour. Transmission biases are forces that arise because people’s psychology makes them more likely to adopt some beliefs rather than others; this occurs when people preferentially adopt some cultural variants rather than others. Biases are often caused by universal characteristics of human cognition or perception. Inertial processes keep the population the same from one time period to the next. Cultural variants compete: first, they compete for the cognitive resources of the learner; for knowledge that is more difficult to acquire, the cost of learning leads to sharp competition between variants. Second, is for control of behaviour. If a cultural variant doesn’t affect behaviour, it won’t be transmitted; there are no recessive memes that do not influence phenotype yet get transmitted anyway. For natural selection on culture to occur, cultural variants (memes) must compete. All other things being equal, beliefs that cause people to behave in ways that make their beliefs more likely to be transmitted will increase in frequency.

- CULTURE IS AN ADAPTATION: culture is an adaptation. It is usually thought that because individual learning is costly, teaching, imitation allow us to inherit a vast store of useful knowledge while avoiding the costs of learning. But this is wrong. If a population only copied from someone who copied from someone, etc, then no one learns anything and there is no connection to the state of the environment and no reason that copying should be adaptive. How is culture adaptive? The ability to acquire novel behaviours by observation is essential for cumulative cultural change; imitation is the only way of learning that gives rise to cumulative cultural evolution. Adaptation by cumulative cultural evolution is not a byproduct of intelligence and social life, since apes don’t seem to be especially clever imitators. Culture is adaptive when it makes individual learning more effective; imitation may increase the average fitness of learners by allowing organisms to learn more selectively; by becoming a selective learner, an individual gains most of the advantages of both learning and imitation. Culture is adaptive when learning is difficult and environments are unpredictable. Selection favours a heavy reliance on imitation when individual learning is error prone or costly, and environments are neither too variable nor too stable. When these conditions are satisfied, our models suggest that natural selection can favor individuals who pay almost no attention to their own experience, and are almost totally bound to the ‘dead hand of custom’. If people can accurately determine the best behaviour, there there is no need to imitate; you just do it. You don’t need to observe your neighbours to duck into shelter when it rains or find shade when it is hot. If the environment changes rapidly, there is no sense in copying what had worked in the past, because what worked for Mom and Dad will be of little help today. But very few organisms have culture like we do; why? Humans adapt to a vast range of environments, and to exploit this range of habitats, humans use a dizzying diversity of subsistence practices and social systems. Humans can live in a wider range of environments than other primates because culture allows the relatively rapid accumulation of better strategies for exploiting local environments compared with genetic inheritance. Every adaptive system ‘learns’ about its environment by one mechanism; for a given amount of inherited knowledge, a learning mechanism can either have detailed information about a few environments, or less-detailed information about many environments. Human culture allows learning mechanisms to be both more accurate and more general, because cumulative cultural adaptation provides accurate and more-detailed information about the local environment.

- CULTURE IS MALADAPTIVE: reproductive restraint in the richest populations is a striking maladaptation. Most evolutionary social scientists think that such maladaptive behaviour arises because the environments in which modern humans live are radically different from those in which humans evolved. This big mistake hypothesis means that much of modern human behaviour is a big mistake from the genes’ point of view. We will make the case that much human maladaptation is an unavoidable byproduct of cumulative cultural adaptation. Professionals who are childless can succeed culturally as long as they have an important influence on the beliefs and goals of their students, employees, or subordinates. Adaptation and maladaptation have the same evolutionary roots; culture gets us lots of adaptive information but also causes us to acquire many maladaptive traits. From the point of view of a selfish viral gene, it’s fine to harm or kill your host, as long as you leave behind enough copies of yourself, and the same applies to memes, or cultural variants. If holding any cultural variant makes it more likely someone will attain one of these roles and if people in such roles play an important part in social learning, that variant will, all other things being equal, tend to spread. Adaptations always involve tradeoffs; imitation is an adaptive information-gathering system, but it involves tradeoffs; culture gets humans fast cumulative evolution on the cheap, but only if it also makes us vulnerable to selfish cultural variants. Four interrelated tradeoffs conspire to weaken the grip of genetically determined biases on cultural evolution. First, people other than parents are a crucial source of adaptive information. Second, content-biases cannot be made too restrictive without becoming too costly or sacrificing the adaptive flexibility that social learning provides. Third, fast and frugal adaptative heuristics have specific maladaptive side-effects. Fourthly, rogue cultural variants evolve devious strategies to evade the effects of content biases. The modern demographic transition may result from the evolution of selfish cultural variants. The demographic transition is at least partly caused by the increased nonparental cultural transmission associated with modernisation. Modern economies require professionals who earn lots and achieve high status; people who delay marriage and child rearing in order to invest time and energy in education and career advancement have an advantage in this competition. High-status people have a disproportionate influence in cultural transmission, so beliefs and values that lead to success in the professional sector will tend to spread. Because these beliefs will typically lead to lower fertility, family size will drop. The evolution of modern industrial societies embodies two linked but imperfectly correlated revolutions. One is a revolution in production due to industrialisation that boosts the material standard of living. The second is a revolution in the structure of the transmission of ideas of all sorts; the rise of mass media and universal education suddenly exposed people to much more nonparental cultural influence than had been experienced in more traditional societies. Proportionally, the scope for the spread of cultural variation in conflict with genetic fitness increased. The change in the relative importance of nonparental transmission in the modern period is progressive and became massive with the development of cheap mass media. And the more nonparental transmission, the greater the opportunity for maladaptive variants to spread. Rare subcultures manage to successfully ‘resist’ the demographic transition, because they have persistently higher birth-rates than other subcultures, becaus their values and beliefs cause them to have higher birth-rates. The Amish and the Hutterites are among those subcultures. Despite substantial wealth, Anabaptist customs block those same features of cultural evolution that make almost all modern societies susceptible to it. Cultural evolution explains the cultural complexity of the demographic transition: as industrial production and social modernisation began to spread from their heartlands in Britain and France, they met very different patterns of resistance and acceptance. The strength and effectiveness of resistance depended on how beliefs, values, and economic activities structured patterns of nonparental transmission of culture and generated forces that favoured or resisted modern ideas. Cultural maladaptations arise from a design tradeoff; culture allows rapid adaptation to a wide range of environments, but leads to systematic maladaptation as a result. Accurate teaching and imitation combined with relatively weak general-purpose learning mechanisms allow populations to accumulate adaptive information much more rapidly than selection could change gene frequencies.

- NOTHING ABOUT CULTURE MAKES SENSE EXCEPT IN LIGHT OF EVOLUTION; because evolution provides the ultimate explanation for why organisms are the way they are, it is the center of a web of biological explanation that links the work of all the other areas of biology into a single, satisfying, explanatory framework. The ultimate explanation for cultural phenomena lies in understanding the genetic and cultural evolutionary processes that generate them. A proper evolutionary theory of culture should make a major contribution to the unification of the social sciences. It allows a smooth integration of the human sciences with the rest of biology and links them all to one another. The social sciences have been bedevilled by a micro-macro problem; if you start with individual-based behaviour, then how can you scale up to understand society-wide phenomena, and vice versa? The basic biological theory includes genes, individuals, and populations. What happens to the individuals affects the population’s properties, even as indivduals are the prisoners of the gene pool they draw upon.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a simple introduction to a particular theory of cultural evolution written by the same authors who offer a more quantitative explanation of the same theory in _Culture and the Evolutionary Process_. This theory is a gene/culture co-evolutionary theory. Before I review, I will offer some historical background about why this book exists.

This theory was considered the main competition to memetic theory in at the turn of the millennium. Both memetics and what has been called "Dual Inheritance Theory" (DIT) had two distinct historical origins both with attempts to explain the evolutionary process of culture. The primary differences between the two (at the time of this publication) were (1) memetics aside from Susan Blackmore's camp had no direct ties to genetic necessity while DIT claims culture and genetics are two causal forces in everyday action and (2) memetics proposed a material basis called a "replicator" (a la Dawkins) or an "interactor" (a la David Hull) while DIT proposes there is no need for a material substrate for replication, nor what geneticists would call "fidelity".

All the above is to say, this book responds to Dawkins' notion of memetics while also motivating the necessity of a science of culture. It positions itself as more ideals while Dawkins' theory is more material (choosing his "brain to brain" analogy over his "mind to mind" analogy) which is kind of odd considering in recent years, we've considered Dawkins to be too idealist and not materialist enough, although I happen to agree with the author's critiques of Dawkins' theory, they do not discredit memetics as a whole. Instead they take riskier claims.

They attach culture to other theories in hypothetical ways that have causal implications. That is to say this theory is riskier because it suggests strong ties to other disciplinary theory, and necessity of these connections. This suggests it should be relatively easy to find flaws empirically with this. However, it isn't clear to me that this is true. As this is very cognitive in nature, it's validation requires us solve the philosophically hard problem of minds. They are constantly referring to suggestive validations by pointing to material actions however and assuming the cognitive reasons. In fact, once the materiality of their arguments are made, I find it difficult to distinquish this theory from Hull's, Wilkins', and (recently) Haig's conception of memetics. Perhaps, as Blackmore opined in her blog, DIT and (early) memetics are essentially the same theory in the end.

As such, this book is valuable in that it suggests a series of hypotheses worthy to be excavated and tested in more recent memetic research. I say "memetic" because largely that is the area of study that has more data at the moment relative to their theory construction and its applicability to digital spaces. The internet claimed "memetics" not "Dual Inheritance Theory", and if we are to believe there is knowledge in evolutionary epistemology, we must see the cultural choice of "meme" as what it should be called regardless of the nuances of theoretical writing.

This is a useful historical look even if significantly dated at this point. It's definitely not a book you should pick up to learn evolution of culture. There are much better works to introduce this at this point.

[Buck Wilde · Rating 1 out of 5]

See the subtitle? I kept truckin through 3/4s of the book, and it was never addressed. There was no transformation of human evolution by culture. There was self-satisfied overexplanation of operant definitions of culture that anyone who graduated 6th grade social studies would already know, with vague references to evolutionary theory but no actual intersection between the two topics. If anything, it seemed like a defensive justification for the idea of culture existing, which I don't think anyone has actually challenged.

If a cabal of wealthy and influential evolutionary biologists (already an oxymoron several times over) said "There is no such thing as human culture!", then this weird, self-indulgent thinkpiece might make sense. They didn't and it doesn't. You'd be better served reading any Matt Ridley book.

[Andoni Sergiou · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a PhD student of cultural evolution, I can't sing my praises for this book enough. Rob and Pete are absolute giants in this field, and much of what they cover here is underpinned by rigorous and sophisticated mathematical frameworks. Yet, this book is remarkably accessible to the general reader, every hard-earned mathematical derivation distilled into common sense principles that are familiar to anyone. If anything, this understates the impact that the authors' work has had on a field that, before their seminal papers in the 80s, seriously underestimated the impact that culture has on genetic evolution.

[Mathias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Culture means the concept of that which shapes, organizes and directs the neural tissue of the human mind, the information dwelling in the human soul, the embodied representation, meaning communcation of experience. The word SPIRIT is synonymous with culture in some sense.

which is a matter of multimodal biographical integration, taking shape through the reciprocal workings between the individual body and its ecological and social surroundings, the matrix of existence

Culture is encoded in language, through material artefacts such as architecture, aswell as spoken and written symbols, in essence musical prosody using the affective modes of the phonetic spectrum. Its proper purpose is always communication of an embodied representation, everything else is brute noise (including romantic mysticism constituting modern religion). This is what St. Paul means when he talks about love.

The choice between cultures, that is SPIRITS, does not happen through autonomous choice, it is a concequence of the social and ecological Exchange with the organs of the body, experiencing pain, shame, wellbeing and prestige. It is in some ways predictable, and therefore addictions and marketing is effective in influencing people, and in some ways unpredictable because the ecological and social environments are unpredictable and influenced by idiosyncrasies

The difference between culture and Genes, analogous to the difference between nurture and nature (miljö och arv), spirit and matter, is that they interact but do not propagate in the same manner. Spirit propagates faster, through imitation, whereas matter propagates through the microscopical movements of particles constituting the lineage of biology, replicating through genetics. All of this is probably encoded in the Genesis story. Human physiology is imitated and can be transmitted artificially via manipulation of material objects- artefacts - which can be used to transform social and ecological surroundings thus driving adaptation and natural selection

The spirit of christianity, the holy spirit, has little or nothing to do with modern religious culture. Rather this culture, or SPIRIT, is driven by predictable social forces such as prestige and shame. I hate it
I think that artificiell intelligence will change the spirit of society in the coming years

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice walk through of the logic behind the gene-culture coevolutionary theory. As a modeler, I wish they had been a bit more detailed with their example models and how to design them, but then they might have missed a wider audience.

[Milovan Dekic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fundamental read for newcomers to the gene-culture coevolution theory.

[Nick Geiser · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent overview of dual inheritance theory and, implicitly, a compelling argument for greater collaboration between the natural and social sciences. Boyd and Richerson's theory of cultural evolution is an important step in the sociobiological program and goes a long way to explain the distinctive aspects of human sociability and intelligence. The book is at times dense and slow-going, but it summarizes in non-technical and generally-clear language nearly 20 years of theoretical work between the co-authors. It makes a compelling case to my mind for their research program.

[Marie Letourneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely informative book that discusses how human culture is as much a force in changing human evolution as our genetics

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall very convincing and well structured. Satisfaction for me was limited mostly by the tedium of discussing empirical data from the humanities, too many characters in that story to keep track of.

[Richard]

The authors are referred to in the New York Times article Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force as the pioneers who "have argued for years that genes and culture were intertwined in shaping human evolution."

This sounds a lot like Memetics, conceived by Richard Dawkins, right? Well, a review of the book in the journal BioScience (Memetics by Another Name? Review of Not by Genes Alone) indicates these authors see a critical difference between their theory and Dawkin's. I was unimpressed by the Dawkins-approved The Meme Machine, so that is probably a good thing.

­

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The three stars are because the material was over my head, not because the book was poorly constructed. It was very interesting material and fascinating when I could follow it. It simply became a bit dry and overwhelming for me because of the terminology.

[Dan Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic - the next step in understanding the evolution of humans and human cognition.

[William Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, but very thought-provoking.