Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion
Peter J. Richerson and Morton H. Christiansen
Abstract
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, leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history, and economics come together in this volume to explore the central role of cultural evolution in different aspects of human endeavor. The contributors ... More
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, leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history, and economics come together in this volume 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. This book is published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.
Keywords:
cultural evolution,
human behavior,
social systems,
technology,
language,
religion
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262019750 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: May 2015 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262019750.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Peter J. Richerson, editor
University of California - Davis
Morton H. Christiansen, editor
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