Bücher der Reihe Evolution and Cognition Series

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 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.

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.