Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among differe...

The application of conventional phylogenetic techniques for inferring cultural history is problematic due to differences in the nature of information transmission in biological and cultural realms. In culture, units of transmission are not just measurable attributes, but communicable concepts. Therefore, relatedness amongst cultural elements often resides at the conceptual level not captured by...

OBJECTIVE Resemblances between parents and children for alcohol use can be due both to cultural transmission and genetic inheritance. We examined the genetic and environmental determinants of the familial resemblances in alcohol use. METHOD With a parent-twin design a distinction was made between the contribution of genetic effects, the environmental influences shared by siblings and the effe...

A person’s identity is the way she is perceived by herself (personal identity) and by others (social identity). For example, “I am a believer in doctrine x”, “I am racially/morally superior”, “I will be hailed as a martyr.” Forms of identity such as these can be valued per se. In their seminal work on the subject, Akerlof and Kranton (2000, 2010) develop a framework for analyzing the role of id...