Cultural Evolution
Cultural Evolution

Author: Peter J. Richerson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 499

ISBN-13: 0262019752

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Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior. 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, in this volume leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history, and economics come together 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. Contributors Quentin D. Atkinson, Andrea Baronchelli, Robert Boyd, Briggs Buchanan, Joseph Bulbulia, Morten H. Christiansen, Emma Cohen, William Croft, Michael Cysouw, Dan Dediu, Nicholas Evans, Emma Flynn, Pieter François, Simon Garrod, Armin W. Geertz, Herbert Gintis, Russell D. Gray, Simon J. Greenhill, Daniel B. M. Haun, Joseph Henrich, Daniel J. Hruschka, Marco A. Janssen, Fiona M. Jordan, Anne Kandler, James A. Kitts, Kevin N. Laland, Laurent Lehmann, Stephen C. Levinson, Elena Lieven, Sarah Mathew, Robert N. McCauley, Alex Mesoudi, Ara Norenzayan, Harriet Over, Jürgen Renn, Victoria Reyes-García, Peter J. Richerson, Stephen Shennan, Edward G. Slingerland, Dietrich Stout, Claudio Tennie, Peter Turchin, Carel van Schaik, Matthijs Van Veelen, Harvey Whitehouse, Thomas Widlok, Polly Wiessner, David Sloan Wilson

Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion
Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion

Author: Radek Kundt

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1474232272

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Radek Kundt compares the notion of evolution in cultural evolutionary theories with neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory to determine the value of the biological concept for studying culture. Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion surveys the historical background of cultural evolution as used in the study of religion, pinpointing major objections to classical nineteenth-century theories. Radek Kundt argues that contemporary theories of cultural evolution do not repeat the same mistakes but that when they are evaluated in terms of fitting the core requirements of neo-Darwinian natural selection, it is clear that they are not legitimate extensions of neo-Darwinian theory. Rather, they are poor metaphors and misleading analogies which add little to conventional cause-and-effect historiographical work. This book also introduces an alternative evolutionary approach to the study of culture which does not claim that the principles of neo-Darwinian evolution should be applicable outside the biological domain. Radek Kundt shows that this alternative evolutionary approach nevertheless provides a deeply enriching line of enquiry that incorporates both biological evolutionary history as shaping cultural change and culture as a force acting on the gene.

Religion in Human Evolution
Religion in Human Evolution

Author: Robert N. Bellah

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-05-08

Total Pages: 777

ISBN-13: 0674252934

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A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. “Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly...Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’” —Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review “Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.” —Richard L. Wood, Commonweal

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Religion
The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Religion

Author: James R. Liddle

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0199397740

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Résumé : This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

Human Evolution Beyond Biology and Culture
Human Evolution Beyond Biology and Culture

Author: Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 575

ISBN-13: 1108470971

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A complete account of evolutionary thought in the social, environmental and policy sciences, creating bridges with biology.

Cultural Evolution
Cultural Evolution

Author: Alex Mesoudi

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-07-30

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0226520455

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Charles Darwin changed the course of scientific thinking by showing how evolution accounts for the stunning diversity and biological complexity of life on earth. Recently, there has also been increased interest in the social sciences in how Darwinian theory can explain human culture. Covering a wide range of topics, including fads, public policy, the spread of religion, and herd behavior in markets, Alex Mesoudi shows that human culture is itself an evolutionary process that exhibits the key Darwinian mechanisms of variation, competition, and inheritance. This cross-disciplinary volume focuses on the ways cultural phenomena can be studied scientifically—from theoretical modeling to lab experiments, archaeological fieldwork to ethnographic studies—and shows how apparently disparate methods can complement one another to the mutual benefit of the various social science disciplines. Along the way, the book reveals how new insights arise from looking at culture from an evolutionary angle. Cultural Evolution provides a thought-provoking argument that Darwinian evolutionary theory can both unify different branches of inquiry and enhance understanding of human behavior.

Religion Evolving
Religion Evolving

Author: Benjamin Grant Purzycki

Publisher: Advances in the Cognitive Science of Religion

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9781800500525

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The scientific study of religion has made significant advances in recent decades, explaining how the mind produces religious ideas, the motivations underlying religious behaviour, and the transmission of religious cultures within and across generations. In Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics, Purzycki and Sosis argue that further progress requires integration of isolated research findings on the various components - ritual, supernatural agent belief, myth, taboo, and so forth - that constitute religion. Religions, they contend, need to be understood as adaptive systems. Drawing from a wealth of ethnographic and experimental evidence, they situate religious systems within their local socioecological contexts, showing how religious culture adaptively responds to economic, environmental, and human health problems, as well as costly threats to cooperation and reproduction. Based in the evolutionary, cognitive, and anthropological sciences, Religion Evolving offers a holistic approach that attends to the complex, interacting features of religious systems.

Culture Evolves
Culture Evolves

Author: Andrew Whiten

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 0199608962

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Culture shapes vast swathes of our lives and has allowed the human species to dominate the planet in an evolutionarily unique way. This book is unique in focusing on the evolutionary continuities in culture, providing an interdisciplinary exploration of culture, written by leading authorities from the biological and cognitive sciences.

The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion
The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion

Author: Yair Lior

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages: 756

ISBN-13: 1000638413

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The past two decades have seen a growing interest in evolutionary and scientific approaches to religion. The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting and emerging field. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook pulls together scholarship in the following areas: evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR) cultural evolution the complementarity of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and cultural evolution Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: Cliodynamics, cultural group selection, costly signaling, dual inheritance theory, literacy, transmitting narratives, prosociality, supernatural punishment, cognition and ritual, meme theory, fusion theory, sexual selection, agency detection, evoked culture, social brain hypothesis, theory of mind, developmental psychology, emergence theory, social learning, cultural cybernetics, cultural epidemiology, evolutionary and cultural psychology, memetics, by-product and adaptationist theories of religion, systems and information theory, and computer modeling. This Handbook is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and anthropology. It will also be very useful to those in related fields, such as psychology, sociology of religion, cognitive biology, and evolutionary biology.