How Darwinian is cultural evolution?

Claidière, N.; Scott-Phillips, T.C.; Sperber, D.

Abstract

Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progress has involved idealizing away from phenomena that may be critical to an adequate understanding of culture and cultural evolution, particularly the constructive aspect of the mechanisms of cultural transmission. Taking these aspects into account, we describe cultural evolution in terms of cultural attraction, which is populational and evolutionary, but only selectional under certain circumstances. As such, in order to model cultural evolution, we must not simply adjust existing replicative or selectional models but we should rather generalize them, so that, just as replicator-based selection is one form that Darwinian selection can take, selection itself is one of several different forms that attraction can take. We present an elementary formalization of the idea of cultural attraction.

Citation

Claidière, N., Scott-Phillips, T., & Sperber, D. (2014). How Darwinian is cultural evolution?. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1642), Article 20130368. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0368

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: May 1, 2014
• Deposit Date: Nov 19, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 6, 2014
• Journal: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
• Print ISSN: 0962-8436
• Electronic ISSN: 1471-2970
• Publisher: The Royal Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 369
• Issue: 1642
• Article Number: 20130368
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0368
• Keywords: Culture, Cultural evolution, Cultural attraction, Population thinking.
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1466956