Books in the Evolution and Cognition Series series

This volume of collected papers brings together applied and theoretical research on risks and decision making in the fields of medicine, psychology, and economics.

The Origin and Evolution of Cultures presents articles based on two notions. That culture is crucial for understanding human behaviour; and that culture is part of biology. Interest in this collection will span anthropology, psychology, economics, philosophy, and political science.

This volume presents papers from one of the leading figures of sociobiology, each with a contectualizing introduction. It functions as a portrait of the intellectual development of sociobiology, with insights pertaining to evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology.

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

This is the second volume of a three volume series on innateness - one of the central questions currently debated in the cognitive and behavioural sciences.

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve presents a road map for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It shows how the brain can be both a complexly specialized organ and a dynamic and flexible self-organizing system, shaped by learning and culture.

Simple Heuristics in a Social World invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant the decision maker little time for deep thought, protracted information search, or complex calculations. Yet,the social world also encompasses domains where social animals such as humans can learn from one another and can forge alliances with one another to boost their chances of success.

Cooperation among humans is one of the keys to our great evolutionary success. This book examines this phenomena with a fusion of theoretical work on the evolution of cooperation, ethnographic descriptions of social behavior, and a range of other experimental results.

A collection of Gigerenzer's important papers on rationality, heuristics, and rituals.