Culture is no explanation – that much is (or should be) obvious to all social scientists. Saying that people do this or believe that “because that's their culture” is at most a descriptive statement – telling us that the behavior or belief in question is widespread in the particular group we are considering – but it begs the question: Why are those behaviors or beliefs common in that group?

Surprisingly, this is a rather new interest in the social sciences. Chiefly responsible for this odd lack of interest was the perennial reluctance of many social scientists to consider micro-processes and their aggregation – that is, the way that individual processes and behaviors create large-scale social phenomena (Schelling, 1978). However, in the last twenty years, a new anthropology and psychology of cultural transmission has emerged, founded on the systematic study of micro-processes – the field has its theoretical foundations (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Sperber, 1985; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992), its mathematical formalisms (McElreath & Boyd, 2007), and droves of empirical studies (see e.g., Atran, 1990; Boyer, 1994; Hirschfeld, 1996 and many others). The main thrust in most of these studies is the study of particular cognitive dispositions and their consequences for cultural transmission, a domain that Pascal Boyer surveys in the final chapter of this book.

One of the ancestors of this field is Milman Parry, who as a young classicist in the 1930s proposed an original (and to many scholars scandalous) explanation of Homeric formulae, these recurrent pairs of nouns and epithets (“rose-fingered Dawn,” “fleet-footed Achilles,” “heifer-eyed Aphrodite,” “Apollo, rouser of armies,” etc.