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Peter J. (Pete) Richerson Distinguished
Professor Emeritus Department
of Environmental Science and Policy University
of California Davis Office: 3146A Wickson Hall |
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Available
Publications Books Cultural Evolution:
Society, Technology, Language and Religion is the product of a Strüngmann Forum from MIT Press Not
By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed the Evolutionary Process from Chicago University Press, 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. Culture
and the Evolutionary Process .The
University
of Chicago Press has kept Rob Boyd's and my 1985 book in print. Principles of Human Ecology textbook. Send
me an email if you want access to electronic copy of this custom published
text Former
Undergraduate Courses The
Global Ecosystem and Geography ESP 30 The Evolution of Societies and
Cultures ESP/ANT 105 Principles of
Environmental Science ESP 110 Graduate Teaching |
My main passion is cultural
evolution. I frequently collaborate with Robert Boyd,
Professor of Human Origins at Arizona State University, in
research on cultural evolution. 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, do experiments, and
conduct observational studies 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 origin of language, 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 taught undergraduates about these things
in my course, Evolution of Societies and Cultures. I am the member of a UCD research
group devoted to the evolutionary study of human behavior. My current and
former colleagues in this endeavor include Richard
McElreath, Mark Lubell,
Billy
Baum, Brian Paciotti,
Tim Waring, Adrian Bell, Vicken
Hillis, Katie
Demps, Bret Beheim, Ryan Baldini
and Matt Zefferman
and Charles Efferson. In the past our lab hosted Max Planck
Society postdoc Christian Cordes from Germany and Fulbright predoc
Pontus Strimling
from Sweden. I have thought 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. This project is
supported by the Collins Education Foundation. We are seeking comments on
sketch of this project which can be found on the CEF
web site. Environmental Science and Policy Home Page Environmental
Policy & Human Ecology AOE Home page |