Human Complex Systems

The thought-provoking review of Denham by Dr. Robert Banks points out some very important parts of cultural analysis, unfortunately seldom discussed. Some of the questions posed by Banks are in part answered by two citations in Denham’s original paper: those of Hirshleifer (1977) and Gammage (2011). While Denham discusses Gammage in a bit more depth (pages 82 and 83), he cites Hirshleifer for more narrow reasons. Hirshleifer, a micro-economist, was one of the original modern thinkers on how biological and cultural evolution can be treated as one subject. Had Hrdy not treated the subject, Denham could have proposed his study showing that Hirshleifer predicted much of what Denham found.