Volume 33, Number 17 · November 6, 1986
Natural Selection of Culture?
By John Maynard Smith
Culture and the Evolutionary Process
by Robert Boyd, by Peter J. Richerson
University of Chicago Press, 331 pp., $29.95
The formal similarities between biological evolution and human history have repeatedly tempted students of one topic to borrow ideas from the other. The most famous and fruitful example of borrowing by biologists of an idea from the human sciences was the use made, by both Darwin and Wallace, of Malthus's picture of human competition for resources as a foundation for their own theory of evolution by natural selection. At a less exalted level, I have myself spent much of the last fifteen years applying the mathematical theory of games, first developed for use in economics, to solve problems in evolution. Indeed, I am by no means the only recent biologist to exploit mathematical economics as a source of ideas.
Review, 2807 words
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