Darwinizing Culture: Pitfalls and Promises
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Darwinizing Culture: Pitfalls and Promises Peter J. Richerson and Morten H. Christiansen (eds): Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013, 485 pp, $38.00 (Hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-262-01975-0 Chris Buskes
Received: 29 August 2014 / Accepted: 22 January 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
1 Introduction The science of cultural evolution is coming of age. In the last two decades a growing body of serious research has emerged on the subject, with contributions coming from a wide range of scientific fields, thus making the study of cultural evolution a collaborative and multidisciplinary enterprise par excellence.1 Participants in the project include biologists, anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, archaeologists, sociologists and philosophers among others. Indeed, many participants believe that their research program will unify the sciences concerned with human origins, human behavior and human society in unprecedented ways. The study of cultural evolution, in general, involves the idea that cultural change is governed by the same basic laws and principles as biological evolution. Cultural evolution, like biological evolution, is essentially a Darwinian selection process in which particular ‘cultural variants’ (e.g., ideas, skills, traits, etc.) are gradually accumulated and passed down to next generations. A key principle here is what Darwin called ‘descent with modification’, i.e., the formation of recognizable lineages through time and the occasional splitting of one lineage into two or more branches, resulting in tree-like phylogenies or ‘family trees’. Because culture evolves, our ancestors were able to accumulate knowledge about their environments, master the use of fire and tools, thus enabling them to survive in the most varied and inhospitable places on earth. Even more interesting, as we shall see, it seems that cultural evolution and biological evolution are involved in an elegant pas 1
See Buskes (2013) for a survey of how the science of cultural evolution gradually evolved and matured. See also Levinson and Jaisson (2006).
C. Buskes (&) Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
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de deux, a dynamic interplay between our biological constitution and our cultural heritage. So culture evolves, not just in the obvious sense that a culture develops and changes through time, but also in the strong sense that it exhibits the typical Darwinian features of variation, cumulative selection, and inheritance. Biological evolution is concerned with the frequency in which genetic variants are distributed and transmitted among a population; cultural evolution is concerned with the frequency in which cultural variants are distributed and transmitted among a population. Evolution exhibits what Dennett (1995, 82) calls ‘substrate neutrality’, i.e., the evolutionary algorithm is neutral with respect to the medium of evolution, and neutral with respect to the ‘entities’ that evolve. In pr
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