Recommendations you can check.
Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and author of The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World.
6 things
Guns, Germs, and SteelBook Jared Diamond
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.
Five Books interview on cultural evolution
2016-10-13·fivebooks.com ↗
The Selfish GeneBook Richard Dawkins
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.
Five Books interview on cultural evolution
2016-10-13·fivebooks.com ↗
Culture and the Evolutionary ProcessBook Robert Boyd & Peter J. Richerson
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.
Five Books interview on cultural evolution
2016-10-13·fivebooks.com ↗
Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human EvolutionBook Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd
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.
Five Books interview on cultural evolution
2016-10-13·fivebooks.com ↗
The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and EmpireBook Joyce Marcus & Kent Flannery
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.
Five Books interview on cultural evolution
2016-10-13·fivebooks.com ↗
The Cultural Origins of Human CognitionBook Michael Tomasello
It's been hugely influential. It's created whole research programmes and driven lots of research.
Five Books interview on cultural evolution
2016-10-13·fivebooks.com ↗
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.