I am Professor of Cultural Evolution at the University of Exeter, UK. In my research I use lab experiments and theoretical models to understand how human culture evolves. Since my undergraduate psychology degree I have always been attracted to big ideas about how evolution has shaped human minds. Yet evolutionary psychology, with its stone age brains frozen in time, seemed unsatisfying. This led me to cultural evolution, with its grand idea that the same evolutionary process underlies both genetic and cultural change. Humans are not just products of countless generations of genetic evolution, but also of cultural evolution. This view of humanity is grander than any other I’ve come across.
I wrote
Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences
This is probably the best pop-science book on cultural evolution that I have read. It’s written by Johnnie Hughes, a nature documentary maker who has since worked on series such as Netflix’s Our Planet. It’s half science book, half travelogue, telling the story of Hughes and his brother’s road trip across the USA, like a mini Voyage of the Beagle. As they go, they explore how the design of teepees has evolved over time to take the varied forms that are currently seen in Native American communities. This is a really entertaining way of introducing the idea that ideas evolve.
Why do some ideas spread, while others die off? Does human culture have its very own “survival of the fittest”? And if so, does that explain why our species is so different from the rest of life on Earth?
Throughout history, we humans have prided ourselves on our capacity to have ideas, but perhaps this pride is misplaced. Perhaps ideas have us. After all, ideas do appear to have a life of their own. And it is they, not us, that benefit most when they are spread. Many biologists have already come to the opinion that our genes are selfish…
Long before ‘memes’ became a synonym for catchy internet videos, they were a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his classic 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe a ‘cultural replicator’ analogous to the gene. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore took this side-thought and ran with it. She argues that human culture in general, as well as specific phenomena such as the origin of language and cooperation, can best be seen through a ‘meme’s eye view’ of selfish memes competing to replicate themselves. Modern cultural evolution research remains sceptical of this rather extreme perspective, often thinking more in terms of benefits and costs to individuals or groups, but Blackmore’s book is thought-provoking and well worth a read.
Humans are extraordinary creatures, with the unique ability among animals to imitate and so copy from one another ideas, habits, skills, behaviours, inventions, songs, and stories. These are all memes, a term first coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene. Memes, like genes, are replicators, and this enthralling book is an investigation of whether this link between genes and memes can lead to important discoveries about the nature of the inner self. Confronting the deepest questions about our inner selves, with all our emotions, memories, beliefs, and decisions, Susan Blackmore makes a compelling case for…
Joe Henrich is a major figure in cultural evolution research and this book represents his big-picture overview of how cultural evolution has transformed humans into the globally dominant species that we are today. He explains how cumulative cultural evolution produces cultural adaptations that solve challenges in our environments usually solved by genetic adaptation, and how cultural evolution has shaped our brains, bodies, and even our genes. Henrich has held positions in anthropology, economics, and psychology departments and this shows in the breadth of research upon which he draws. This book provides the theoretical basis for many more recent works, including Henrich’s own The Weirdest People in the World.
Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in…
I’ve included this book to illustrate how the perspective of cultural evolution is spreading to disciplines and problems far beyond its origins in biology and anthropology. In this case the discipline is economic history and the problem is explaining why the Enlightenment, which paved the way for the rapid technological and economic transformations brought about by the subsequent Industrial Revolution, occurred when it did (1500-1700) and where it did (Western Europe). Mokyr’s answer draws on cultural evolutionary concepts to argue that a culturally transmitted mindset of innovation and progress, as well as the intense competition of ideas within a politically fragmented Europe, led to rapid scientific advances. Essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of the modern world.
Why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution
During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much has been made of the details of the Industrial Revolution, what remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today's unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations…
While ‘nature vs nurture’ is an unhelpful dichotomy, most psychologists still assume that our species’ unique cognitive abilities, from language to mindreading, are innate products of genetic evolution. Here Celia Heyes provides a counter-argument to this assumption, arguing instead that human cognition is often the product of cultural evolution. Something like language is therefore not an ‘instinct’ but rather a ‘cognitive gadget,’ akin to a technological gadget, transmitted culturally rather than genetically. This is one of those books that makes you rethink your assumptions, and whether you agree or not with its claims, you come out smarter at the end.
"This is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences... Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year."-Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course…
Charles Darwin revolutionised biology by showing how his theory of evolution can account for the stunning diversity and complexity of life on earth. Over the last few decades, a growing group of scholars have argued that the same theory of evolution can also explain the stunning diversity and complexity of human culture, encompassing languages, religion, technology, economic systems, art, literature, science, and more. Cultural Evolution provides an accessible overview of this burgeoning field, explaining what it means to say that culture ‘evolves,’ and how evolutionary tools developed in biology can illuminate problems that have long bedevilled the social sciences and humanities. It also argues that just as evolutionary theory united and synthesised the biological sciences, it can do the same for the social sciences.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
