ABSTRACT
The papers in this book range widely and deeply across many issues. They touch on gene-culture coevolutionary processes; models of cultural evolution; conformity and innovation; personal identity and the sense of self; purposive behavior and chance events; modes of individual and mass communication; and the role of the state as a regulator, a source of information, and an agent in changing behavior. On this broad canvas, these studies address the implications of cultural variation and transmission for the evolution and development of human biological characteristics. In doing so, they make more explicit some of the many links between biological sciences and work in the field of social anthropology. In this epilogue, I reflect on three themes that surfaced from time to time during the symposium and that suggest some ideas for further research. These link social information transmission to memory and recollection, tradition and the heritability of culture, and the wider role of teleological argument in human biological and social sciences.
