Evolution and Human Behavior

Evolution and Human Behavior is the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the field of cultural evolution and human behavioral ecology. Co-founded by Peter Richerson in 1979 (originally titled Ethology and Sociobiology), the journal publishes empirical and theoretical research on the evolutionary bases of human behavior, including cultural transmission, cooperation, mate choice, and social organization. It serves as the primary venue for work applying the tools of Dual Inheritance Theory and gene-culture coevolution to data from diverse human populations.

The journal's founding marked a turning point in the scientific study of human behavior. Before its establishment, research on the evolution of behavior was scattered across anthropology, psychology, and biology journals, often without mutual recognition. Evolution and Human Behavior created a disciplinary home for the integrative project that treats human behavior as the product of multiple inheritance systems — genetic, cultural, and ecological — operating simultaneously. It publishes work drawing on experimental economics, cross-cultural psychology, and phylogenetic comparative methods.

The journal remains central to debates about the empirical tractability of cultural evolution models. Critics and proponents alike publish there, making it a genuine forum rather than an echo chamber. Its existence is itself evidence that cultural evolution has achieved the institutional density of a mature science.