Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
Abstract
Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth, and our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal's. In Not by Genes Alone, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that only a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can explain these unique characteristics. Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Richerson and Boyd consider culture to be essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion. Drawing on work in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, and economics - and building their case with such fascinating examples as kayaks, clever knots, and yams that require twelve men to carry them - Richerson and Boyd convincingly demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked. In abandoning the nature-versus-nurture debate as fundamentally misconceived, Not by Genes Alone is a truly original and groundbreaking theory of the role of culture in evolution and a book to be reckoned with for generations to come.
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- Authors
- Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Davis (US)
- University of California, Los Angeles (US)
- Venue
- University of Chicago Press eBooks
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 2004
- OpenAlex
- W1484547183
- Cited by
- 2,793
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 33 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 43 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 46 · 2021: 137 · 2020: 147 · 2019: 141 · 2018: 137 · 2017: 169 · 2016: 186 · 2015: 205 · 2014: 195 · 2013: 162 · 2012: 202
- FWCI
- 304.01
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- University of Chicago Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Keywords
- cultural evolution, human evolution, gene-culture coevolution, human adaptability, social complexity, cooperation, nature versus nurture, human behavior, cultural psychology
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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