Herbert Gintis - resources

Herbert Gintis has been doing a lot of work on cultural evolution in the past decade. His work on cultural evolution is mostly oriented around the issue of why humans cooperate with each other to the extent that they do - why humans are ultrasocial. Here are some related resources:

Herbert Gintis, Darwin and modern science

Video: Five Principles for the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences - Herbert Gintis

Bayesian Rationality and Social Norms

Visiting Scholar Herbert Gintis discusses lecture plans

Herbert Gintis - From the Integrating Science and Humanities Conference

Herbert has written some books. From my Memetics Booklist:

	A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution	Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis	Why do humans, uniquely among animals, cooperate in large numbers to advance projects for the common good? Contrary to the conventional wisdom in biology and economics, this generous and civic-minded behavior is widespread and cannot be explained simply by far-sighted self-interest or a desire to help close genealogical kin. In A Cooperative Species, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis--pioneers in the new experimental and evolutionary science of human behavior--show that the central issue is not why selfish people act generously, but instead how genetic and cultural evolution has produced a species in which substantial numbers make sacrifices to uphold ethical norms and to help even total strangers.
	Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life	Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr	Moral Sentiments and Material Interests presents an innovative synthesis of research in different disciplines to argue that cooperation stems not from the stereotypical selfish agent acting out of disguised self-interest but from the presence of 'strong reciprocators' in a social group.Presenting an overview of research in economics, anthropology, evolutionary and human biology, social psychology, and sociology, the book deals with both the theoretical foundations and the policy implications of this explanation for cooperation. Chapter authors in the remaining parts of the book discuss the behavioral ecology of cooperation in humans and nonhuman primates, modeling and testing strong reciprocity in economic scenarios, and reciprocity and social policy. The evidence for strong reciprocity in the book includes experiments using the famous Ultimatum Game (in which two players must agree on how to split a certain amount of money or they both get nothing.)
	Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies	Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis	This path-breaking book addresses the nature of human sociality. By bringing together experimental and ethnographic data from fifteen different tribal societies, the contributors are able to explore the universality of human motives in economic decision-making, and the importance of social, institutional and cultural factors, in a manner that has been extremely rare in the social sciences. Its findings have far-reaching implications across the social sciences.

Herbert Gintis home page: http://people.umass.edu/gintis/. His papers.

Alas, Gintis does not seem to be a fan of memes:

I think the meme concept is a loser because it is too detached from the gene concept to render a mimetic analysis evolutionarily coherent. The correct theory is that of gene-culture coevolution, as developed by several authors, including Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman.

In another review Gintis says:

They even manage to treat memetics seriously, despite the fact that memetics' attempt to detach culture from reproduction, production, cooperation, conflict, and the other basic activities of social life cannot possibly succeed.

Here's another review:

I think the answer to Stanovich's problem is that the whole notion of memetics is rubbish. His defense of the notion in the book is uncharacteristically weak, to the point of being pathetic. For instance, he asserts that memetics itself is a meme complex, so if many people accept memetics and memetics is wrong, the memetics must be right! In fact, memetics posits behavior with no evolutionary justification. This is: we accept memes because they force themselves upon us. But, a creature who behaved in this way would be evolutionarily eclipsed by another who did not succumb.