Cultural Evolution

<b>Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior.</b> <p/>Over the past few decades a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights however has been hampered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. To remedy this in this volume leading researchers from theoretical biology developmental and cognitive psychology linguistics anthropology sociology religious studies history and economics come together to explore the central role of cultural evolution in different aspects of human endeavor. <p/>The contributors take as their guiding principle the idea that cultural evolution can provide an important integrating function across the various disciplines of the human sciences as organic evolution does for biology. The benefits of adopting a cultural evolutionary perspective are demonstrated by contributions on social systems technology language and religion. Topics covered include enforcement of norms in human groups the neuroscience of technology language diversity and prosociality and religion. The contributors evaluate current research on cultural evolution and consider its broader theoretical and practical implications synthesizing past and ongoing work and sketching a roadmap for future cross-disciplinary efforts. <p/><b>Contributors</b> <br>Quentin D. Atkinson Andrea Baronchelli Robert Boyd Briggs Buchanan Joseph Bulbulia Morten H. Christiansen Emma Cohen William Croft Michael Cysouw Dan Dediu Nicholas Evans Emma Flynn Pieter François Simon Garrod Armin W. Geertz Herbert Gintis Russell D. Gray Simon J. Greenhill Daniel B. M. Haun Joseph Henrich Daniel J. Hruschka Marco A. Janssen Fiona M. Jordan Anne Kandler James A. Kitts Kevin N. Laland Laurent Lehmann Stephen C. Levinson Elena Lieven Sarah Mathew Robert N. McCauley Alex Mesoudi Ara Norenzayan Harriet Over Jürgen Renn Victoria Reyes-García Peter J. Richerson Stephen Shennan Edward G. Slingerland Dietrich Stout Claudio Tennie Peter Turchin Carel van Schaik Matthijs Van Veelen Harvey Whitehouse Thomas Widlok Polly Wiessner David Sloan Wilson