Year: 2009
Type: preprint
Abstract: According to Richerson and Boyd (2005), cultural evolution can be a Darwinian process but not a genetic one, proceeding largely by the selective survival and transmission of habits, tools, and ideas.Of course, culture can select genes to coevolve, as in the selection on two separate occasions of mutations for the adult digestion of lactose following the domestication of cattle (Tishkoff et al. 2007).But the chief reason that modern society is different from Paleolithic society is down to extensive and cumulative cultural change, rather than extensive and cumulative genetic change.The entities that compete for survival in cultural evolution are variants of culture.Selective survival happens because human beings copy one another in learning such things, and occasional fortuitous improvements in relatively faithful copying can be sufficient to allow Darwin ian natural selection to occur.There is less intentionality in history than human beings like to assume.This is not a new idea.The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (1960) wrote that in social evolution, the decisive factor is "selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits."The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (1976) in the 1970s coined the term "meme" for a unit of cultural imitation.The economist Richard Nelson in the 1980s proposed that whole economies evolve by natural selection (Nelson and Winter 1982).But until recently, Darwinian cultural evolution had not been formally modeled.Now it has been, and it is clear that the parallels with genetic evolution are closer than might have been expected (Henrich et al. 2009).Copying and innovation in culture are thus equivalent to replication and mutation in biology.Tribalism and language divergence are equivalent to speciation (Pagel and Mace 2004), whereas functional adaptation-fitting form to function-is rampant in cultural evolution, as are Red Queen arms races in which advantages prove to be transient.Differences exist between cultural and genetic evolution, but modeling shows that they do not prevent Darwinian consequences.For example, the fact that muta-
Author: M. W. Ridley
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3150079742