[bbenzon]

This is a brief guide to the various papers and books that William Benzon and David Hays have written about the long-term evolution of culture. Much of the work is descriptive in that it characterizes a variety of cultural phenomena at four different cultural Ranks as characterized by the conceptual mechanisms available to the culture but does not attempt to describe the causal process by which these mechanism have evolved in human history. The ranks have numerical designations that align with widely recognized historical epochs: Rank 1, preliterate; Rank 2, literacy; Rank 3, post-Renaissance West, industrialism; and Rank 4, 20th century. Ranges of phenomena considered: basic cognition and thinking, narrative, music, expressive culture, technology, forms of governance and economic organization. The approach is briefly contrasted with work by Robert Wright, Richard Dawkins, Boyd and Richerson, and others.