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A watershed book that masterfully integrates insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies "There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature." Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book. Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, he offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as, Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information like rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation.

Cognition and culture --- Cognition --- Socialization --- Social evolution --- 316:2 --- 316:2 Godsdienstsociologie --- Godsdienstsociologie --- Cultural evolution --- Cultural transformation --- Culture, Evolution of --- Culture --- Evolution --- Social change --- Child socialization --- Children --- Enculturation --- Social education --- Education --- Sociology --- Psychology --- Culture and cognition --- Ethnophilosophy --- Ethnopsychology --- Cognitive psychology --- Social psychology

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How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language. Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us. As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.--

Cognition and culture --- Nature and nurture --- Social evolution --- Evolutionary psychology --- #SBIB:316.23H1 --- Psychology --- Human evolution --- Cultural evolution --- Cultural transformation --- Culture, Evolution of --- Culture --- Evolution --- Social change --- Environment --- Genetics and environment --- Heredity and environment --- Nature --- Nature versus nurture --- Nurture and nature --- Genetics --- Heredity --- Human beings --- Culture and cognition --- Cognition --- Ethnophilosophy --- Ethnopsychology --- Socialization --- Kennissociologie --- Nurture --- Effect of environment on --- Philosophy of nature --- Philosophy and psychology of culture --- Cognitive psychology --- Theory of knowledge --- Evolution. Phylogeny --- Environment and genetics --- Environment and heredity