Journal ArticleDOI
Does Culture Evolve
TLDR
The drive to describe cultural history as an evolutionary process has two sources: biology and biological anthropology in the belief that the theory of evolution must be universal in its application to all functions of all living organisms and social theory, which is pre-Darwinian.Abstract:
The drive to describe cultural history as an evolutionary process has two sources. One from within social theory is part of the impetus to convert social studies into “social sciences” providing them with the status accorded to the natural sciences. The other comes from within biology and biological anthropology in the belief that the theory of evolution must be universal in its application to all functions of all living organisms. The social--scientific theory of cultura evolution is pre-Darwinian, employing a developmental model of unfolding characterized by intrinsic directionality, by definable stages that succeed each other, and by some criterion of progress. It is arbitrary in its definitions of progress, and has had the political problem that a diachronic claim of cultural progress implies a synchronic differential valuation of present-day cultures. The biological scheme creates an isomorphism between the Darwinian mechanism of evolution and cultural history, postulating rules of cultural “mutation,” cultural inheritance and some mechanism of natural selection among cultural alternatives. It uses simplistic ad hoc notions of individual acculturation and of the differential survival and reproduction of cultural elements. It is unclear what useful work is done by substituting the metaphor of evolution for history.read more
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Cultural Keystone Species: Implications for Ecological Conservation and Restoration
Ann Garibaldi,Nancy J. Turner +1 more
TL;DR: The concept of cultural keystone species is explored, similarities to and differences from ecologicalKeystone species are described, examples from First Nations cultures of British Columbia are presented, and the application of this concept in ecological restoration and conservation initiatives is discussed.
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Darwinism in economics: from analogy to ontology
TL;DR: Darwinism is fully relevant for economics and an adequate evolutionary economics must be Darwinian, at least in these fundamental senses as mentioned in this paper. But this does not undermine the need for auxiliary theories and explanations in the economic domain.
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Managing complex adaptive systems — A co-evolutionary perspective on natural resource management
TL;DR: The co-evolutionary perspective outlined in this paper serves as heuristic device to map the interactions settled in the networks between the resource base, social institutions and the behaviour of individual actors to improve the management of social–ecological systems.
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The cultural evolution of emergent group-level traits.
TL;DR: The emergence and evolution of group-level traits and the implications for the theory of cultural evolution are discussed, including ramifications for the evolution of human cooperation, technology, and cultural institutions, and for the equivalency of multilevel selection and inclusive fitness approaches.
Journal ArticleDOI
Nongenetic Selection and Nongenetic Inheritance
TL;DR: This paper argues that the received view of evolution is wrong and proposes a reformulation of the concepts of inheritance and heritability, which implies that some selection is at bottom genetic selection.
References
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Book
Cultural transmission and evolution: a quantitative approach
TL;DR: A mathematical theory of the non-genetic transmission of cultural traits is developed that provides a framework for future investigations in quantitative social and anthropological science and concludes that cultural transmission is an essential factor in the study of cultural change.
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Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture
Michael Hammond,Jerome H. Barkow +1 more
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Some caveats about cultural transmission models
TL;DR: The authors apply a population-biological modeling approach to the problems of cultural transmission and cultural evolution, and argue that this approach is based on a weak analogy and that evolutionary biology has something to offer students of social influence and cultural change, something other than an analogy with evolutionary population genetics.