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How Darwinian is cultural evolution?

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

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Authors

N. Claidière

T.C. Scott-Phillips

D. Sperber



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 Mar 29, 2024
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.

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