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...

Focus on the way in which cultural variants affect other variants' probabilities of transmission in modeling and empirical work can enrich Kline's conceptualization of teaching. For example, the problem of communicating complex cumulative culture is an adaptive problem; teaching methods that manage transmission so that acquisition of some cultural variants increases the probability of acquiring...

Cross-cultural anthropologists have increasingly used phylogenetic methods to study cultural variation. Because cultural behaviours can be transmitted horizontally among socially defined groups, however, it is important to assess whether phylogeny-based methods--which were developed to study vertically transmitted traits among biological taxa--are appropriate for studying group-level cultural v...

The complexity and variability of human culture is unmatched by any other species. Humans live in culturally constructed niches filled with artifacts, skills, beliefs, and practices that have been inherited, accumulated, and modified over generations. A causal account of the complexity of human culture must explain its distinguishing characteristics: It is cumulative and highly variable within ...