Not by Genes Alone

Twenty years after their formal treatise, Richerson and Boyd wrote the readable version for non-specialists. The argument is the same -- culture is a second inheritance system that coevolves with genes -- but the mathematics recedes and the examples multiply. Why do humans cooperate in large groups of unrelated strangers? Why do food taboos persist? Why does technology accumulate in some societies and not others? The answers, they argue, lie in cultural group selection and the biases built into how humans learn from each other. More useful than the 1985 book for citing and connecting to adjacent fields, and the best single introduction to the Boyd-Richerson programme.