ISBN10: 019518145X, ISBN13: 9780195181456, [publisher: Oxford University Press, USA] Softcover 456 p.: Graphics. Lediglich die Broschur ist leicht berieben und bestoßen. 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 ...
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