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Peter J. (Pete) Richerson Department of Environmental Science and Policy University of California Davis Office: 3146A Wickson Hall |
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Current Courses
Available
Publications Rob Boyd and I have two recent books.
Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed the Evolutionary Process from Chicago, is meant for a general audience.
The Origin and Evolution of Cultures is a collection of our more important papers published by Oxford University Press. Undergraduate Teaching The Global Ecosystem and Geography ESP 30 The Evolution of Societies and Cultures ESP/ANT 105 Principles of Environmental Science ESP 110
Principles
of Human Ecology textbook Graduate Teaching Advanced Topics in Human Ecology ECL 210
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My main passion is cultural evolution. I frequently collaborate with Robert Boyd, Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, in research on cultural evolution. Our work is mostly theoretical and conceptual. We use methods of analysis of evolution mainly developed by evolutionary biologists to study the processes of cultural evolution. The idea is to make models that illuminate the evolutionary properties of human culture and animal social learning, and the processes of gene-culture coevolution. For an accessible general account of this work in historical perspective click here (pdf file). In recent publications we have been using the theoretical models to try to understand some of the main events in human evolution, such as the evolution of the advanced capacity for imitation (and hence cumulative cultural evolution in humans), the origins of tribal and larger scale cooperation, and the origins of agriculture. We and our students have conducted experiments and field work aimed at understanding the processes of cultural evolution. I teach undergraduates about these things in Richard McElreath's and my course, Evolution of Societies and Cultures. Cultural Evolution Lab: I am the member of an NSF funded research group devoted to the study of cultural evolution in laboratory scale microsocieties. My colleagues in this endeavor are Richard McElreath, Mark Lubell, Billy Baum, Brian Paciotti, Tim Waring, Adrian Bell, Vicken Hillis, Katie Demps, Bret Beheim and Matt Zimmerman. Our lab has recently hosted Max Planck Society postdoc Christian Cordes from Germany and Fulbright predoc Pontus Strimling from Sweden. My ex student Charles Efferson is collaborating with our lab but conducts his own experiments. Our objectives are to pick apart the details of human social learning strategies using tightly controlled experiments and to create laboratory scale microsocieties to scale up from the individual level decision rules to actual microevolution. At present we are investigating the evolution of institutions to manage cooperation using the Public Goods game as the cooperation task. Our initial papers are available on my recent pubs page. I have begun to think about practical applications of cultural evolution. Russell Genet, Dwight Collins, and I have a project to apply ideas derived from what Boyd and I called the "tribal social instincts" and "workaround" hypothesis to questions of managing businesses and other medium scale human organizations. Innate aspects of our social psychology coevolved with cultural institutions as an adaptation to tribal social life. These tribal instincts are the raw material out of which all human social systems are built. Businesses and other medium scale social systems are much like tribes except that they are embedded in a web of other organizations that make up our complex societies. The institutions of complex societies include workarounds to finesse the problems generated a psychology adapted to a rather different sort of social system. We aim to have a comprehensive science-based theory of organizational management that properly accounts, for example, for human propensities to cooperate and for the fact that organizations are dynamically evolving entities. This project is supported by the Collins Family Foundation. We are seeking comments on sketch of this project which can be found on the CFF web site, The University of Chicago Press has kept Rob Boyd's and my 1985 book Culture and the Evolutionary Process in print.
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