Culture and the Evolutionary Process

The foundational treatise that gave cultural evolution a mathematical backbone. Boyd and Richerson built formal models showing how cultural transmission -- biased imitation, conformism, prestige bias -- can be treated with the same population-level tools used in genetics, while following its own distinct dynamics. Culture is not merely a product of genes; it is a parallel inheritance system with its own selective pressures and drift. Published in 1985, the book was ahead of its time and remained a specialist text for two decades before the field it launched gained mainstream traction. The formal apparatus is demanding, but the core insight -- that culture evolves, and its evolution can be modelled rigorously -- remains the foundation of everything that followed.