Cultural evolution: integrating psychology, evolution and culture

Integrating Development and Evolution in Psychology: Looking Back, Moving Forward

Integrating development and evolution in psychology: Looking back, moving forward

Modern psychology, from its inception, has been informed by ideas imported from related fields of inquiry. It is widely acknowledged, for example, that Sigmund Freud’s familiarity with Darwin’s theory of evolution contributed to the development of his own ideas about the determinants of psychological functioning (Sulloway, 1992). Likewise, the founder of the first psychology laboratory in the U...

Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture

This article develops an evolutionary theory of conflict over the construction of culture that is informed by current knowledge of psychological mechanisms. Psychological mechanisms important for the production of culture include (1) general intelligence (including the ability to engender hypothetical scenarios and means-end reasoning necessary for constructing tools and other exemplars of tech...

Cultural commons and cultural evolution

Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary perspective, with a focus on the implications of group definition for the coexistence of different cultures. A model of cultural evolution is presented wher...

The Evolution of Cultural Evolution

In 1860, aiming to be the first Europeans to travel south to north across Australia, Robert Burke led an extremely well-equipped expedition of three men (King, Wills and Gray) from their base camp in Cooper’s Creek in central Australia with five fully loaded camels (specially imported) and one horse. Figuring a maximum round trip travel time of three months, they carried twelve weeks of food an...