"Virtually all aspects of human behavior show enormous variation both within and between cultural groups, including material culture, social organization and language. Thousands of distinct cultural groups exist: about 6,000 languages are spoken today, and it is thought that a far greater number of languages existed in the past but became extinct. Using a Darwinian approach, this book seeks to explain this rich cultural variation. There are a number of theoretical reasons to believe that cultural diversification might be tree-like, that is phylogenetic: material and non-material culture is clearly inherited by descendants, there is descent with modification, and languages appear to be hierarchically related. There are also a number of theoretical reasons to believe that cultural evolution is not tree-like: cultural inheritance is not Mendelian and can indeed be vertical, horizontal or oblique, evidence of borrowing abounds, cultures are not necessarily biological populations and can be transient and complex. Here, for the first time, this title tackles these questions of cultural evolution empirically and quantitatively, using a range of case studies from Africa, the Pacific, Europe, Asia and America. A range of powerful theoretical tools developed in evolutionary biology is used to test detailed hypotheses about historical patterns and adaptive functions in cultural evolution. Evidence is amassed from archaeological, linguist and cultural datasets, from both recent and historical or pre-historical time periods. A unifying theme is that the phylogenetic approach is a useful and powerful framework, both for describing the evolutionary history of these traits, and also for testing adaptive hypotheses about their evolution and co-evolution. Contributors include archaeologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and linguists, and this book will be of great interest to all those involved in these areas."

"(Attention Conservation Notice: this is an unholy mashup between historical speculation and experience from 23 Things, exacerbated by too much checking footnotes and not enough sleep)."

Eric Rauchway describes, with excerpts, an essay by on this subject by Maurice Bloch, with illustrations from WWI. Sounds astonishingly like Dan Sperber, only with an unfortunate collectivist overlay.

Added: the reviewer for the _Journal of Interdisciplinary History_ was unimpressed with the theorizing (which does sound like a lot of heavy breathing...), and points to basic arithmetic errors (!). May still be worth looking at. Might the data set be available?

Don't ask me what the title means. Papers may be worth tracking down. Huge causal inference problems implicit here.

Update: thanks to Wolfgang for telling me that "Dengue Fever" is the name of a California-based Cambodian rock band.

Update 2: They're on emusic and they sound pretty good.

Looks great, but unfortunately the library doesn't subscribe. Waah. (Update: thanks to readers T. and W. for copies!)

_Confucian China and Its Modern Fate_ is one of the best works of history I have ever read.

Truly excellent book on mathematical models of herding, information contagion, etc. under rational choice, by a friend of family.

"create a device that will autonomously train crows. So far we've trained captive crows to deposit dropped coins they find on the ground in exchange for peanuts. The next step is to see how quickly we can get wild crows to learn the system, and then how q

Fascinating, but way beyond my competence to evaluate.

Making the obvious points that (1) his Malthusian mechanisms were at work in a lot of places, not just England, and (2) even if you take the heritability of personality traits at face value, it's very weak

Some supporting details for Bowles's review