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Title: Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process by Charles J. Lumsden, Edward O. Wilson ISBN: 0-674-34475-8 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 1981 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.50

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: Brilliant ideas, flawed analysis
Comment: It is difficult to decide whether to praise this book for its (at the time) innovative and novel approach to gene-culture coevolution or criticize it for its endless slurry of ad hoc models with groundless or unspecified assumptions. One can do both. The idea they present, that there is a positive feedback mechanism between biological and cultural evolution, is by far the best working hypothesis for why human society "took off" after millenea of paleolithic stasis. The theory central to the book is that genetic constraints shape culture, which in turn becomes the cultural environment in which an individual's Darwinian fitness is determined, forming a positive feedback between cultural and evolutionary change. This posits a specific mechanism for the role of genetic change in cultural evolution, going far beyond the intellectually vacuous "resolution" of the nature-nurture debate by those who say "it's both." However, none of the models they present can be regarded as anything but mathematical playthings, in few cases are any of the variables or parameters quantities that can actually be measured or therefore tested. Often, it is not entirely clear what the dependent variables in the system correspond to in nature. Worse still, some of the models are completely ad hoc: first positing a dynamical behavior, then presenting an apparently arbitrary dynamical system which exhibits the property as "proof" of the theory. In essence, an uneven work, but one which I think will be at the foundation for further work in the area, at least as a basis for concepts and theory (provided the specifics are taken with a large grain of salt).