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Book
The evolution of techniques : rigidity and flexibility in use, transmission, and innovation
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ISBN: 0262378396 0262378388 Year: 2024 Publisher: Cambridge : The MIT Press,

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A novel, interdisciplinary exploration of the relative contributions of rigidity and flexibility in the adoption, maintenance, and evolution of technical traditions. Techniques can either be used in rigid, stereotypical ways or in flexibly adaptive ways, or in some combination of the two. The Evolution of Techniques , edited by Mathieu Charbonneau, addresses the impacts of both flexibility and rigidity on how techniques are used, transformed, and reconstructed, at varying social and temporal scales. The multidisciplinary contributors demonstrate the important role of the varied learning contexts and social configurations involved in the transmission, use, and evolution of techniques. They explore the diversity of cognitive, behavioral, sociocultural, and ecological mechanisms that promote and constrain technical flexibility and rigidity, proposing a deeper picture of the enablers of, and obstacles to, technical transmission and change. In line with the extended evolutionary synthesis, the book proposes a more inclusive and materially grounded conception of technical evolution in terms of promiscuous, dynamic, and multidirectional causal processes. Offering new evidence and novel theoretical perspectives, the contributors deploy a diversity of methods, including ethnographies, field and laboratory experiments, cladistics and phylogenetic tree building, historiography, and philosophical analysis. Examples of the wide range of topics covered include field experiments with potters from five cultures, stability and change in Paleolithic toolmaking, why children lack flexibility when making tools, and cultural techniques in nonhuman animals.


Book
The WEIRDest people in the world : how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous
Author:
ISBN: 9780374173227 0374173222 9781250800077 1250800072 Year: 2021 Publisher: New York : Picador : Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

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"Perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, analytical, and trusting of strangers. They focus on themselves--their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations--over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich tackles this question and others by weaving together cutting-edge research from anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology. Tracking the origins of monogamous nuclear families back into Late Antiquity, Henrich reveals how the Roman Catholic Church unintentionally shifted people's psychology, and the trajectory of Western civilization, by transforming the most fundamental of human institutions: those related to marriage and kinship. It was these social and psychological changes in Europe that eventually catalyzed and coevolved with expanding impersonal markets, rising occupational specialization, and growing competition among voluntary associations--laying the foundation for the modern world. Provocative and engaging in its vast scope and surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history."--Back cover.

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