Mike looks at this ratchet process and he argues that the key adaptation was what he calls ‘theory of mind’ or ‘mentalizing’. But as jobs demand more skill and pure labour power becomes less important, the economic value of children declines and so cultural norms of limiting family size, of having babies late, are able to spread in a way they couldn’t in earlier societies. The books also got me thinking about language. Why does the term ‘cultural evolution’ seem to be somewhat controversial, then? Then you need an even bigger brain that’s even better at that stuff. Then they put that together and use it to enrich archaeological cases, whether from Mesoamerica—Mayan, Aztecs, Inca societies—or Mesopotamia and other places. Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior.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. “Tools and social institutions and languages shaped our genes.”. It’s a popular book, so it’s written to be digestible to readers who don’t have a biological background. Then, once you have brains that are better at doing that, you’ll get more cultural information. Cultural Evolution argues that people's values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure; it was precarious for most of history, which encouraged heavy emphasis on group solidarity, rejection of outsiders, and obedience to strong leaders. In the case of humans, I argue that it wasn’t some magic genetic bullet that allowed humans to get cumulative cultural evolution, but that we’re a primate and that we had, maybe, chimpanzee-like social learning, but that we lived in a different social structure, and it was actually differences in social structure which allowed humans to begin this cumulative accumulation of knowledge. So if you look at how economists think about energising innovation, they often want to increase the incentive to inventors, so beef up the patent laws or create some way in which inventors can make more money on their inventions. One side would insist that human behaviour is determined by culture — so there were anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins who wrote a book called The Use and Abuse of Biology. Gene cultural co-evolution can provide that. So, for example, if you want to study economic behaviour, you can study it in economics, or in economic anthropology. There used to be malaria in southern England. How are people buried? How does it fit in? But in societies where you have hereditary power, in which one group of people are better by virtue of their birth than other people, then the kids often get buried with lots of fancy stuff. by Joyce Marcus & Kent Flannery The Selfish Gene On the other side, people like Richard Dawkins argued that genetic evolution played an important role in explaining behaviour and human behavioural variation. The problem with archaeology is that you just have the material remains of past societies. A lot of times the environment, the things that cue up these different psychological processes, are themselves influenced by cultural evolution. That might make you think, ‘Oh! Tell me about this book. Another way is to partition, to think about different groups competing and the genetic composition of those different groups, and that can be useful for certain kinds of problems. It would seem to demand what researchers call an ‘autocatalytic process’ — the process had to fuel itself. Read. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire, Life Below the Surface of the Earth Books, The Best Fiction of 2020: The Booker Prize Shortlist, High School Teachers Recommend Books by Subject.