Three Roads to Cultural Recurrence

Social scientists have long remarked that there is consistency in what people believe and value over time, especially within definable groups. Anthropologists call this body of information “culture.” There are (at least) three causal mechanisms that can explain the recurrence of cultural traits. Recurrence can occur through 1) strong individual learning biases; 2) population-level normalizing effects on what is adopted; and 3) replicator-based inheritance. Each of these mechanisms is favored by a particular brand of evolutionary theorizing about human society. Evolutionary psychologists (EPs) advocate the first option, which emphasizes the ability of universal structures in the evolved mind to come up with the same responses to environmental conditions time and again. What explains cultural consistency over time, then, is evolved psychological decision-making processes in the face of common environmental challenges (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). A group I call “cultural selectionists” (CSs) prefer the second option, which notes that even poor social learning abilities can still produce consistently shared features at the level of the group if there are widely shared psychological preferences for traits or the types of individuals from whom to acquire culture (Boyd and Richerson 2000; Henrich and Boyd in press; Gil-White 2001). The third option, based on replication of the same information from generation to generation, is the memetic position (Dawkins 1976; Blackmore 1999; Aunger in press a). In this scenario, the cultural features that keep popping up are the phenotypic expressions of memes, or cultural replicators, disseminating through the population via social communication. This variety in the possible explanations for cultural evolution is not generally recognized, nor do advocates of one position generally acknowledge the validity of others. But I will argue in this paper that all three of these possibilities are viable in our present state of ignorance about the means through which cultural traits reappear each generation; any one of them may account for a particular aspect of cultural inheritance.