Patterns and Processes in Cultural Evolution

Futures, 1998

ABSTRACT This essay looks at the idea that human culture is an evolving system, a complex entity that undergoes evolutionary processes. This idea can also be expressed as follows: the cultural infosphere has the same mode of operation as the organic biosphere. There are three parts to the essay: it begins with some highlights from the history of evolutionary thinking; second, it explains the mechanisms of cultural selection; and third, it discusses the vision of the future provided by evolutionary thinking. The kind of evolutionary thinking focused upon is one that takes Charles Darwin seriously. The depth, reach and relevance of Darwinian thinking has been aptly exposed by Daniel C. Dennett,[1]and this essay assesses its worth in futures research.

American Anthropologist, 1989

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2011

This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich et al. (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons that respond to microfeatures. This enables associations to be made, and cultural change to be generated. Second, ‘replicator dynamics’ do not ensure natural selection. The replicator notion does not capture the distinction between actively interpreted self-assembly code and passively copied self-description, which leads to a fundamental principle of natural selection: inherited information is transmitted, whereas acquired information is not. Third, this principle is violated in culture by the ubiquity of acquired change. Moreover, biased transmission is less important to culture than the creative processes by which novelty is generated. Fourth, there is no objective basis for determining cultural fitness. Fifth, the necessity of randomness is discussed. It is con...

2018

In the last two decades there has been a concerted effort to 'unify' the study of culture through Darwinian approaches borrowed from biology. This reapplication has produced some notable successes, especially with the more long-lived aspects of culture, such as language and tool use traditions. Yet many aspects of culture do not obviously fit within a Darwinian framework, either because they are aperiodic (do not replicate), or because they are singular and not susceptible to population-based approaches. With these issues in mind, I introduce a broader overview of cultural processes that can encompass both Darwinian and non-Darwinian behaviors, and that permits a detailed comparison of biological and cultural processes. I then combine this overview with ideas derived from the work of Carl Woese that describe the development of biological systems from their first beginnings. I show how Woese's concept of a 'Darwinian Threshold', originally conceived to explain the early history of life, can describe the trajectories of cultural as well as biological phenomena. In biology, the Darwinian Threshold is a theoretical construct that lies several billion years in our past, but in the cultural field it is both accessible to study and part of daily life. I discuss examples of the application of these ideas to understanding the emergence of technologies, based on published examples, and a new case study examining the emergence of a scientific institution (the Royal Society of London).

1991

Culture pervades human lives and has allowed our species to create niches all around the world and its oceans, in ways quite unlike any other primate. Indeed, our cultural nature appears so distinctive that it is often thought to separate humanity from the rest of nature and the Darwinian forces that shape it. A contrary view arises through the recent discoveries of a diverse range of disciplines, here brought together to illustrate the scope of a burgeoning field of cultural evolution and to facilitate cross-disciplinary fertilization. Each approach emphasizes important linkages between culture and evolutionary biology rather than quarantining one from the other. Recent studies reveal that processes important in cultural transmission are more widespread and significant across the animal kingdom than earlier recognized, with important implications for evolutionary theory. Recent archaeological discoveries have pushed back the origins of human culture to much more ancient times than traditionally thought. These developments suggest previously unidentified continuities between animal and human culture. A third new array of discoveries concerns the later diversification of human cultures, where the operations of Darwinian-like processes are identified, in part, through scientific methods borrowed from biology. Finally, surprising discoveries have been made about the imprint of cultural evolution in the predispositions of human minds for cultural transmission.

The evolution of cultural information implies certain concepts. First is that of culture as essentially contents of human minds. Second is that of information, albeit the information that flows through human minds as humans interact with each other socially. Culture is not information generated within human minds solipsistically; only when this solipsistic internal material is articulated socially and made to interact with other humans does it become culture. A third notion is that of evolution, as the human carriers of this social information interact with their environments and change the information characteristics of culture.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011

Culture pervades human lives and has allowed our species to create niches all around the world and its oceans, in ways quite unlike any other primate. Indeed, our cultural nature appears so distinctive that it is often thought to separate humanity from the rest of nature and the Darwinian forces that shape it. A contrary view arises through the recent discoveries of a diverse range of disciplines, here brought together to illustrate the scope of a burgeoning field of cultural evolution and to facilitate cross-disciplinary fertilization. Each approach emphasizes important linkages between culture and evolutionary biology rather than quarantining one from the other. Recent studies reveal that processes important in cultural transmission are more widespread and significant across the animal kingdom than earlier recognized, with important implications for evolutionary theory. Recent archaeological discoveries have pushed back the origins of human culture to much more ancient times than traditionally thought. These developments suggest previously unidentified continuities between animal and human culture. A third new array of discoveries concerns the later diversification of human cultures, where the operations of Darwinian-like processes are identified, in part, through scientific methods borrowed from biology. Finally, surprising discoveries have been made about the imprint of cultural evolution in the predispositions of human minds for cultural transmission.

Evolutionary developmental theories in biology see the processes and organization of organisms as crucial for understanding the dynamic behavior of organic evolution. Darwinian forces are seen as necessary but not sufficient for explaining observed evolutionary patterns. We here propose that the same arguments apply with even greater force to culture vis-a-vis cultural evolution. In order not to argue entirely in the abstract, we demonstrate the proposed approach by combining a set of different models into a provisional synthetic theory, and by applying this theory to a number of short case studies. What emerges is a set of concepts and models that allow us to consider entirely new types of explanations for the evolution of cultures. For example we see how feedback relations -- both within societies and between societies and their ecological environment -- have the power to shape evolutionary history in profound ways. The ambition here is not to produce a definite statement on what such a theory should look like but rather to propose a starting point along with an argumentation and demonstration of its potential.

History and Philosophy of The Life Sciences, 2018

In the field of cultural evolution it is generally assumed that the study of culture and cultural change would benefit enormously from being informed by evolutionary thinking. Recently, however, there has been much debate about what this ''being informed'' means. According to the standard view, an interesting analogy obtains between cultural and biological evolution. In the literature, however, the analogy is interpreted and used in at least three distinct, but interrelated ways. We provide a taxonomy in order to clarify these different meanings. Subsequently, we discuss the alternatives model of cultural attraction theory and memetics, which both challenge basic assumptions of the standard view. Finally, we briefly summarize the contributions to the special issue on Darwin in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which is the result of a collaborative project between scholars and scientists from the universities of Lille and Ghent. Furthermore, we explain how they add to the discussions about the integration of evolutionary thinking and the study of culture. Keywords Cultural evolution Á Darwin Á Nature and culture Á Cognition and culture Á Cultural attraction Á Epidemiology of representations Á Memetics & Stefaan Blancke