If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution

Biology and Philosophy 30 (4):481-503 (2015)
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Abstract

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 different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied

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Citations of this work

Culture and Cognitive Science.Andreas De Block & Daniel Kelly - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Cultural evolution.Tim Lewens - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
What are cultural attractors?Andrew Buskell - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (3):377-394.
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | Vol 75, No 1.Mathieu Charbonneau - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4):1209-1233.

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References found in this work

The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - 1992 - Oxford University Press. Edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby.
The descent of man.Charles Darwin - 1874 - Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books. Edited by Michael T. Ghiselin.

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