Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

Abstract

We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in "social cognitive neuroscience," although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences.

An evolutionary framework for cultural change: Selectionism versus communal exchange

“…It has been claimed that inheritance is a key Darwinian property of cultural as well as biological evolution [87], and some anthropologists use the term dual inheritance theory to refer to efforts to explain how human behavior is a product of both genetic and cultural evolution [8,60,61]. However, applying the term inheritance to culture is also problematic.…”

“…If it were possible to root the social and behavioral sciences in an evolutionary framework, they might achieve a unification comparable with Darwin's unification of the life sciences. Thus it is unsurprising that, dating back to Herbert Spencer's introduction of the notion of social Darwinism a few years after Darwin's Origin of Species, Darwinian thinking has been applied to a range of phenomena outside of biology, including creativity [14,111], neural copying and pruning [11,12,13,23,26], law [55], cosmology [118], computer-mediated communication [74], and perhaps most extensively, cultural and economic change [7,8,15,71,86,87,107,108]. Elements of culture build on one another cumulatively, as demonstrated even in laboratory settings [10].…”

The evolution of cultural adaptations: Fijian food taboos protect against dangerous marine toxins

“…In the last three decades, the application of evolutionary theory to understanding the origins and nature of social learning has generated a variety of insights into the behaviour of humans and other animals (Galef & Laland 2005;Mesoudi et al 2006). Theoretical work has illuminated both the ways in which natural selection has shaped human capacities for social learning Boyd & Richerson (1985) as well as how those capacities can, over generations, give rise to culturally evolved adaptations-that is, to yield complex, culturally transmitted, behavioural repertoires that address local environmental challenges (Boyd & Richerson 1996;Henrich 2004).…”

Creative Industries: fashion versus reason

“…Hence, the unit of transmission continues to be a key concern cultural evolution studies (27). In going further, many have gone back, to Dawkins' (1976) meme concept to postulate that culture itself evolves within its environment of human minds (Shennan 2002, Lake 1997, 1998; Aunger 2000; Mesoudi et al 2006) regardless of the difficulty of agreeing on definitions of culture or finding units to quantifying it, which are really just our problems as scientists to overcome.…”