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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Selfish GeneTheir words
I really picked this book because for me, and I think for lots of people, it was an entry point into thinking about applying evolutionary principles to human behaviour. In a very user-friendly way, it gives you some of the basic tools you can use to start thinking about it.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Culture and the Evolutionary ProcessTheir words
But it is Boyd and Richerson who ended up writing a book, in 1985, called Culture and the Evolutionary Process, which is a highly technical book, but really lays out a framework for thinking about the interaction between genes and culture — how culture can give rise to different kinds of social phenomena, how it can explain human cooperation.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human EvolutionTheir words
Finally, Not by Genes Alone puts together 30 years of research in one place. It makes the case that culture is really important, that it is evolving, and that we can solve lots of problems—like explaining 'the demographic transition'—by thinking about cultural evolution.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Guns, Germs, and SteelTheir words
The book is a masterpiece in terms of integrating a vast range of material from different disciplines, material on language, archaeology, comparative bio-geography, with also lots of his own ethnographic field studies peppered in there.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and EmpireTheir words
But Flannery and Marcus show, in my view persuasively, that you can use ethnographic cases to enrich your understanding of the archaeological record, and then look at how things like religion, the organisation of clans, and a bunch of different social factors allow some societies to scale up and get stratification, whereas other societies seem impeded by their social structure from scaling up. They don't end up being larger and more integrated, but they also don't end up with high degrees of social inequality.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Cultural Origins of Human CognitionTheir words
It's been hugely influential. It's created whole research programmes and driven lots of research.