Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- 1 New rules for old games -- Why genes are not enough -- Why culture is not enough -- Genes and culture: new studies and new problems -- Selective and instructive processes in evolution - Darwinian Lamarckism -- Are there animal cultures? -- Memes and reproducers: the 'unit' problem -- Back to Darwin -- Summary -- Notes -- 2 What is pulling the strings of behaviour? -- Genes: fate or challenge? -- The problem of information -- Natural selection of what? -- Summary -- Notes -- 3 Learning and the behavioural inheritance system -- What is learning? -- Ways of learning -- Conditions and constraints -- Remembrance of things past -- The social transmission of learnt behaviour -- Habits and traditions -- Summary -- Notes -- 4 Parental care - the highroad to family traditions -- Parental effects -- The information lacuna -- Channels of transmission -- The parental heritage -- The transmission of foraging behaviour -- The transmission of anti-predator behaviour -- Choosing a home -- Choosing a mate - the transmission of sexual tastes -- The transmission of the transmission mechanism -- Evolving family traditions -- Summary -- Notes -- 5 Achieving harmony between mates - the learning route -- Male-female conflict -- Mate choice - the use of learning -- Courtship feeding -- The colours of the natal environment -- The sounds of home -- Familiarity as a basis for co-operation between mates -- The parental team - co-ordination and division of labour between mates -- Age, experience and breeding success -- Co-ordination between mates - duetting -- Information sharing and the evolution of co-operation between mates -- Summary -- Notes -- 6 Parents and offspring - too much conflict? -- Conflicts, quarrels, and the co-evolution of parent-offspring relationships.

From just-so stories to just-so strategies? -- Weaning conflicts or parentally guided maturation? -- Conflicts in the womb and beyond -- Parental control: 'From each according to [its] abilities, to each according to [its] needs' -- Daughters and sons -- The family unit -- Summary -- Notes -- 7 Alloparental care - an additional channel of information transfer -- Self-interested helping -- Help thy kin and spread thy genes -- Helping is good for all - delayed benefits, reciprocity and mutualism -- The benefits of adoption -- Phenotypic cloning through alloparenting -- Summary -- Notes -- 8 The origins and persistence of group legacies -- Social cohesion and social death -- Mechanisms of cohesion: transfer, rituals and rites -- More about group cohesion: contagion and reproductive suppression -- The benefits of sharing information -- Social death -- The evolutionary origin and maintenance of groups -- Group selection and selection for interactions within groups -- Groups over time - learnt habits and traditions -- Habits and the origin of species -- Summary -- Notes -- 9 Darwin meets Lamarck - the co-evolution of genes and learning -- The ecology of learning -- The ecology and evolution of instinctive behaviour: evolution in constant environments -- The ecology and evolution of social and individual learning: evolution in rapidly varying environments -- The ecology and evolution of transgenerational transmission: evolution in environments with intermediate-length cycles -- The receding horizon: the evolution of altered and enhanced learning -- Lengthening the behavioural sequence - the assimilate-stretch principle -- The evolution of new ways of learning: switching modalities -- The evolution of the rules of learning -- Selection through habits: the co-adaptation of genes and traditions.

Some evolutionary effects of maternally transmitted learnt behaviours -- Summary -- Notes -- 10 The free phenotype -- Social transmission of information in insects, and early learning in man -- Between development and evolution: beyond the replicator -- Cultural construction and cultural selection -- Language: a new inheritance system -- Beyond cultural determinism: freedom and the hope of reason -- Notes -- References -- Index of species -- Index of subjects.