Abstract
Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations; (4) the "cultural fitness" of a mental representation can be inferred from its successful transmission; and (5) selective forces only matter if the sources of variation are random. We close by sketching the outlines of a unified evolutionary science of culture.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 119-137 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Journal | Human Nature |
Volume | 19 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2008 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Cultural evolution
- Cultural transmission
- Dual inheritance theory
- Epidemiology of representations
- Memes
- Replicators
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Anthropology
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
- Sociology and Political Science