How Darwinian is cultural evolution?

How Darwinian is cultural evolution?

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 progres...

Cultural evolution is not equivalent to Darwinian evolution

Darwinian evolution, defined as evolution arising from selection based directly on the properties of individuals, does not account for cultural constructs providing the organizational basis of human societies. The difficulty with linking Darwinian evolution to structural properties of cultural constructs is exemplified with kinship terminologies, a cultural construct that structures and delinea...

Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences

Perspective: is human cultural evolution Darwinian? Evidence reviewed from the perspective of the Origin of Species.

The claim that human culture evolves through the differential adoption of cultural variants, in a manner analogous to the evolution of biological species, has been greeted with much resistance and confusion. Here we demonstrate that as compelling a case can now be made that cultural evolution has key Darwinian properties, as Darwin himself presented for biological evolution in The Origin of Spe...

Darwinian model of evolution

The remarkable feature of life is its ability to self-reproduce. Self-replicating systems fit in naturally with Darwin's evolution scheme. However, I argue here that what Darwin thought was natural selection driven by the struggle for existence is indeed a manifestation of the zeroth law of thermodynamics. When this law is applied to competing self-replicating entities biological evolution appe...