The first I had read of him was while doing work for my MA thesis. I found his article "The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine, 1917-1939" very interesting and conceptually helpful.
The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine, 1917-1939 American Ethnologist > Vol. 16, No. 4 (Nov., 1989), pp. 719-744 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0094-0496%28198911%2916%3A4%3C719%3ATSCOP1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H
I recommend it to anyone interested.
But, from what I have read from some of his other work on evolution and cognitive modularity and such, he has some compelling argumentation, and seems to be taking an interesting line that balances between evidence of significant cultural variations across populations, along with evidence of limits to these variations...and some, dare it be said, 'universals'.
The Cultural Mind: Environmental Decision Making and Cultural Modeling Within and Across Populations, Psychological Review 2005, Vol. 112, No. 4, 744–776 00 http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/satran/files/the_cultural_mind.pdf
Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion by Scott Atran Ara Norenzayan Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 27, Issue 06, Dec 2004, pp 713-730 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=311513&jid=&volumeId=&issueId=&aid=311512
Also, his critique of Memes is interesting: Appeared in: Human Nature 12(4):351-381, 2001 THE TROUBLE WITH MEMES : INFERENCE VERSUS IMITATION IN CULTURAL CREATION
http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/satran/files/human_nature_01.pdf
Has quite a lot of other published works on the subject out there.
I would be interested in anyone's comments/critiques about his work actually...
Bryan
Jerry Monaco wrote:
> On 5/30/06, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>>
>>
>> > This is what bothers me most about evolutionary biology and related
>> forms: their basic premises are (a) tautological and (b) _trivial_
>> tautologies: i.e., at most have a poetic advantage over other ways of
>> saying the same thing.
>>
>> To put it another way: I have yet to see one single proposition in
>> evolutionary psycholgy which does not fit one of two categories: (a)
>> true, but one does not need to know a fucking thing about biology to
>> demonstrate it is true, or (b) it's a just-so story, which can only be
>> abstractly affirmed rather than demonstrated, and offers no guidance
>> whatever to understanding either biology or society.
>>
>> Carrol
>> __
>
>
> Carrol, I think that you are basically correct about how sociobiology
> is applied to human societies, but even here there are some broad
> hints we can draw from contrasts with the social organizations of
> mammals. Even so, these broad hints do not lead to theoretical models
> that can be applied with any certitude. But it does seem significant
> that humans are the only primate species with a relatively high level
> of male investment in caring for the young. This is why I said that
> some of the assumptions behind sociobiology and evolutionary
> psychology seem to me good starting hypotheses but no matter how much
> philosophers such as Dennett claim that such hypotheses have obtained
> theoretical depth, as far as I am concerned, they are just pounding on
> the table. But this is a long story.
>