The Origin and Evolution of Cultures

Abstract Over the past 25 years, Boyd and Richerson have become well-known across a wide range of disciplines for their path-breaking work on evolution and culture. This work collects twenty of the influential but relatively inaccessible published articels that form the backbone of this research. It could not be more timely given the growing influence of evolutionary psychology. The papers – which were published in a diverse set of journals and which are not easily available – a conceptually linked and form a cohesive, unified evolutionary account of human culture. Their interdisciplinary research is based on two notions. First, that culture is crucial for understanding human behavior: unlike other organism,…