Robert Boyd: UCLA Department of Anthropology

In this talk I explain how culturally heritable differences in wealth between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning process driving cultural evolution increases individuals’ economic gains. The key assumptions are that human populations are structured into groups and that cultural learning is more likely to occur within groups than between groups. Then, if groups are sufficiently isolated and there are potential gains from specialization and exchange, stable stratification can sometimes result. This model predicts that stratification is favored by (1) greater surplus production, (2) more equitable divisions of the surplus among specialists, (3) greater cultural isolation among subpopulations within a society, and (4) more weight given to economic success by cultural learners. I will conclude by arguing that this mechanism may explain why there is much more heritable variation among groups within the human species than in other taxa.
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/boyd/HenrichBoydCA0908.pdf