Joseph Henrich
Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and author of The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World.
Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Robert Boyd & Peter J. Richerson
But it is Boyd and Richerson who ended up writing a book, in 1985, called Culture and the Evolutionary Process, which is a highly technical book, but really lays out a framework for thinking about the interaction between genes and culture — how culture can give rise to different kinds of social phenomena, how it can explain human cooperation.
on fivebooks.com · 13 Oct 2016
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
The book is a masterpiece in terms of integrating a vast range of material from different disciplines, material on language, archaeology, comparative bio-geography, with also lots of his own ethnographic field studies peppered in there.
on fivebooks.com · 13 Oct 2016
Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd
Finally, Not by Genes Alone puts together 30 years of research in one place. It makes the case that culture is really important, that it is evolving, and that we can solve lots of problems—like explaining 'the demographic transition'—by thinking about cultural evolution.
on fivebooks.com · 13 Oct 2016
The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire by Joyce Marcus & Kent Flannery
But Flannery and Marcus show, in my view persuasively, that you can use ethnographic cases to enrich your understanding of the archaeological record, and then look at how things like religion, the organisation of clans, and a bunch of different social factors allow some societies to scale up and get stratification, whereas other societies seem impeded by their social structure from scaling up. They don't end up being larger and more integrated, but they also don't end up with high degrees of social inequality.
on fivebooks.com · 13 Oct 2016
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello
It's been hugely influential. It's created whole research programmes and driven lots of research.
on fivebooks.com · 13 Oct 2016
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
I really picked this book because for me, and I think for lots of people, it was an entry point into thinking about applying evolutionary principles to human behaviour. In a very user-friendly way, it gives you some of the basic tools you can use to start thinking about it.
on fivebooks.com · 13 Oct 2016
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