Review of 'Not by Genes Alone' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Phew, yet another book I found fun to read but hard to review.
I was introduced to (biological & cultural) evolution and sociobiology through Dawkins and my HS biology teacher about 10 years back & it turned me in some kind of adolescent [read: know-it-all] version of Darwin's Bulldog for some time. Sorry for everyone who had to endure me during that period (I guess amongst others Philipp also had to suffer from that when we started our undergrad studies).
So in a way many things introduced in the book weren't exactly new to me. But I found the book to be a pretty nice summary of all the different fields and issues that cultural evolution touches and looking from a biologists point of view I found that they make a convincing case for a holistic perspective on how to study how biological & cultural evolution interact and co-evolve. Having …
Phew, yet another book I found fun to read but hard to review.
I was introduced to (biological & cultural) evolution and sociobiology through Dawkins and my HS biology teacher about 10 years back & it turned me in some kind of adolescent [read: know-it-all] version of Darwin's Bulldog for some time. Sorry for everyone who had to endure me during that period (I guess amongst others Philipp also had to suffer from that when we started our undergrad studies).
So in a way many things introduced in the book weren't exactly new to me. But I found the book to be a pretty nice summary of all the different fields and issues that cultural evolution touches and looking from a biologists point of view I found that they make a convincing case for a holistic perspective on how to study how biological & cultural evolution interact and co-evolve. Having said that: I'm not too sure who should be the audience for this book. The brief summaries on e.g. kin selection, etc. worked fine for me, though I'm not too sure whether this will work for people who are approaching the topic more from the cultural side of things with maybe a bit less general knowledge of evolutionary biology.
Again from the evolutionary biology side of thing I feel they approached the issue of adaptationist thinking and the just-so-storytelling of evolutionary psychology in a sensible way (esp. given that it was published in 2006): Having plausible stories to tell with your data is the way evolutionary biology often has to work, given that it's hard to perform experiments (Lenski's LTEE and alike notwithstanding). But there's only so much story that your data can support before you leave science and enter the realm of novel writing.
To summarize: I guess if you're looking for a primer on cultural evolution this may work fine, though I feel you should bring at least some knowledge of (strict) biological evolution to get the most out of it.