Not by Genes Alone
Source: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3615170.html ↗
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.
Central argument
Richerson and Boyd argue that culture is not merely a product of human biology but a second, distinct inheritance system that coevolves with genes. Humans acquire beliefs, practices, and norms by copying others — selectively, through biases like conformity and prestige — and these culturally transmitted traits then compete between groups, not just individuals. This cultural group selection explains phenomena that pure genetic accounts cannot: large-scale cooperation among strangers, the persistence of costly food taboos, and why technological accumulation is uneven across societies.
Critique
The cultural group selection mechanism, while theoretically coherent, depends on between-group variation being maintained faster than within-group copying erodes it — a condition the book asserts more than it empirically establishes for modern, high-mobility societies. A thoughtful reader might also press on the circularity risk: when a norm persists, it is attributed to selection pressure, but the counterfactual — what would have been selected against — is rarely specified with enough precision to be falsifiable. The framework is more powerful as a post-hoc explanatory vocabulary than as a generative predictive model.
Why it matters for product
The conformity and prestige-bias learning mechanisms are a direct model for how product norms spread inside organisations: teams do not evaluate practices from first principles but copy what high-status peers or successful adjacent teams do, which explains why dysfunctional rituals (lengthy roadmaps, vanity metrics) are so resistant to rational argument alone. For a CPO, this reframes culture change as an evolutionary problem — you need to alter who counts as a prestige model and create enough between-team variation to allow selection to operate, rather than issuing top-down mandates that leave the underlying copying biases untouched.