Can animal culture drive evolution?

Beans, Carolyn

doi:10.1073/pnas.1709475114

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Thus, interacting with a complex structured social environment can influence gene expression and even cognition. Culture can be one of many influences that shape behavior (Brakes et al 2021) and could have the potential to affect evolutionary processes in several ways (e.g., social learning and cultural innovations) (Beans 2017;Whiten 2021). According to a proscriptive view, cultural processes could thus be the result of the coupling between an organism and its environment (including the social aspects) as emerging viable trajectories underdetermined by the constraints of survival and reproduction, possibly influencing evolution processes rapidly due to its cumulative nature (Whiten 2019).…”

Section: A Proscriptive Definition Of Adaptation and Its Implication ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

When the “satisficing” is the new “fittest”: how a proscriptive definition of adaptation can change our view of cognition and culture

Magnon

Corbara²

2022

Sci Nat

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Since Darwin's theory of evolution, adaptationism is frequently invoked to explain cognition and cultural processes. Adaptationism can be described as a prescriptive view, as phenotypes that do not optimize fitness should not be selected by natural selection. From an epistemological perspective, the principle of a prescriptive definition of adaptation seems incompatible with recent advances in epigenetics, evolutionary developmental biology, ethology, and genomics. From these challenges, a proscriptive view of adaptation has emerged, postulating that phenotypes that are not deleterious will be evolutionary maintained. In this epistemological investigation, we examine how the shift from adaptationism to a proscriptive view changes our view of cognition and culture. We argue that, while adaptationism leads to cognitivism and a view of culture as strategies to optimize overall fitness, the proscriptive definition favors embodied theories of cognition and a view of culture as the cumulative diffusion of behaviors allowed by the constraints of reproduction.

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