Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution

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.

Robert BoydEmail:

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Joseph Henrich   (Ph.D. UCLA, 1999) holds the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution in the Departments of Psychology and Economics at the University of British Columbia. His research combines behavioral and cognitive experiments, in-depth field ethnography, and evolutionary modeling to explore the coevolutionary emergence of cooperative institutions, prosocial motivations, religions, and complex cultural adaptations. See his website at Robert Boyd   received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California at San Diego and a Ph.D. in ecology from UC Davis. He has taught at Duke and Emory universities and has been at UCLA since 1986. With Herb Gintis, Rob currently co-directs the MacArthur Research Network on the Nature and Origin of Preferences. His research focuses on population models of culture. Rob has also co-authored an introductory textbook in biological anthropology, How Humans Evolved, with his wife, Joan Silk. He and Joan have two children and live in Los Angeles. His hobbies are rock climbing and bicycling. Peter J. Richerson   received undergraduate and graduate degrees in entomology and zoology at the University of California, Davis. He is currently Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis. His research focuses on the processes of cultural evolution, most of it co-authored with Robert Boyd. Their 1985 book applied the mathematical tools used by organic evolutionists to study a number of basic problems in human cultural evolution. His recent publications have used theoretical models to try to understand some of the main events in human evolution, such as the evolution of the advanced capacity for imitation (and hence cumulative cultural evolution) in humans, the origins of tribal and larger-scale cooperation, and the origins of agriculture. He collaborates with Richard McElreath and Mark Lubell in an NSF-funded research group devoted to the study of cultural transmission and cultural evolution in laboratory systems.