Perspectives in Ethology

The relations between behavior, evolution, and culture have been a subject of vigorous debate since the publication of Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). The latest volume of Perspectives in Ethology brings anthropologists, ethologists, psychologists, and evolutionary theorists together to reexamine this important relation. With two exceptions (the essays by Brown and Eldredge), all of the present essays were originally presented at the Fifth Biannual Symposium on the Science of Behavior held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in February 1998. The volume opens with the problem of the origins of culture, tackled from two different viewpoints by Richerson and Boyd, and Lancaster, Kaplan, Hill, and Hurtado, respectively. Richerson and Boyd analyze the possible relations between climatic change in the Pleistocene and the evo lution of social learning, evaluating the boundary conditions under which social learning could increase fitness and contribute to culture. Lancaster, Kaplan, Hill, and Hurtado examine how a shift in the diet of the genus Homo toward difficult-to-acquire food could have determined (or coe volved with) unique features of the human life cycle. These two essays illus trate how techniques that range from computer modeling to comparative behavioral analysis, and that make use of a wide range of data, can be used for drawing inferences about past selection pressures. As culture evolves, it must somehow find its place within (and also affect) a complex hierarchy of behavioral and biological factors.

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This volume is perhaps best characterised by its interdisciplinary nature and reliance on an eclectic range of approaches. One theme that naturally emerges from the collected essays is that of causation versus analogy. Phenomena defined at multiple levels can in principle be studied in two ways - vertically and horizontally. The vertical strategy directly specifies causal relations holding between levels, whereas the horizontal approach looks for parallels between levels, seeking to isolate shared causal properties. One of the essays here stands directly for the vertical strategy, while another warns explicitly against the perils of a loose selectionist analogy among levels. Other parallels between evolution and culture are probed, calling attention to the general limits of analogy, or carefully noting the respects in which the proposed analogy is expected to break down. The other themes of economics, optimisation, and stability, when not explicitly mentioned, lurk in the background of any treatment of culture and behaviour in relation to natural selection.

Contenu
1 Built for Speed: Pleistocene Climate Variation and the Origin of Human Culture.- 2 The Evolution of Life History, Intelligence and Diet Among Chimpanzees and Human Foragers.- 3 Cultures as Supraorganismal Wholes.- 4 Niche Construction And Gene-Culture Coevolution: an Evolutionary Basis for the Human Sciences.- 5 Biological and Material Cultural Evolution: are There any True Parallels?.- 6 Pitfalls of Behavioral Selectionism.- 7 Being Concrete About Culture and Cultural Evolution.- 8 Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital.- 9 Evolutionary Models of Music: from Sexual Selection to Group Selection.- 10Biology, Culture, & Religion.