ubc | Humans are not just group living social animals. They are also cultural animals. Humans, more than any other species, have the special capacity to preserve behavioral modifications and inventions initiated by group members, by transmitting them horizontally across group members, and vertically across generations (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981; Heyes & Galef, 1996; Sperber, 1990, 1996; Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993).
For example, once a new and useful food gathering technique is discovered by some individuals, humans have the capacity to preserve , and possibly improve upon, the new skill through social, rather than biological transmission. Many theorists have suggested that the cognitive and behavioral capacities that make human culture possible - complex communication skills, social learning mechanisms, identification with a social group, biased processing of information that favors ingroup members and prestigious individuals - evolved because of the adaptive benefits that they offered to individuals (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Henrich & Boyd, 1998; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Richerson & Boyd, 2005; Tomasello et al., 1993).
Individual survival and reproduction were facilitated by participation within certain kinds of coordinated group activity where behavioral changes could be retained and perpetuated within the group. Thus, it is likely that psychological mechanisms promoting these sorts of coordinated group actions evolved in humans (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). Several chapters in this book (Brewer & Caporael, this volume; Van Vugt & Van Lange, this volume) review many of these specific arguments, and so we will not belabor them here. The summary point is simply this: There are very likely specific evolved psychological mechanisms within social groups for the emergence of the sort of coordinated group activity that is minimally necessary for human culture to exist.
Human cultures are more than just well-coordinated social groups; they are well-coordinated social groups in which the individuals share massive amounts of common goals, desires, values, beliefs and other forms of knowledge. Cultures are defined not just by the fact that individuals within those cultures share many kinds of knowledge, but also by the specific kinds of knowledge that they find important to share. Cultures consist of specific prohibitions and taboos, specific moral "rights" and "wrongs," specific supernatural beliefs, specific themes in literature and art, and so on.
Although cross-cultural research often draws attention to the differences between cultures (e.g., different supernatural agents appear in different religious traditions), this body of literature also reveals striking similarities in the basic contours of any culture (e.g., most if not all religions revolve around one or more supernatural agents that share striking cognitive similarities across cultures). Indeed, thorough reviews of the ethnographic record have revealed hundreds of universal patterns and norms across the full spectrum of human cultures (Brown, 1991). What accounts for the similarities underlying different belief systems? One set of answers is provided by evolutionary analyses of human cognition and social behavior.
