An Archaeological Regard on the Concept of Fitness in Cultural Evolution

Abstract

**Author(s):** Araujo, A G M; Okumura, M. The archaeological record is the only long-term record of human culture. Therefore, researchers interested in understanding cultural evolutionary patterns of long duration would greatly benefit from studying archaeological materials. The Cultural Evolutionary Theory postulates that one can approach cultural changes or stasis through evolutionary terms borrowed (and then adapted) from Biological Evolutionary Theory. More recently, there has been a debate about how to observe fitness in cultural evolution. We believe that the debate about fitness can not advance properly without an assessment of three different modalities of knowledge that were devised by Greek philosophers: doxa, sophia, and episteme. Doxa constitutes common sense constructed in an unsystematic way and that form the fabric of relatively uninformed idea of how the world operates. Sophia can be understood as wisdom, or informed knowledge which comes with experience and old age. Episteme is “real knowledge”, which we can translate nowadays as scientific knowledge. It is radically different from doxa and at the same time transcends sophia in the sense that it uses the scientific method, rather than personal experience, to build knowledge about the world. Here we argue that each of these modes of knowledge involves different cultural transmission processes and have distinct consequences in terms of cultural fitness. We propose that the majority of examples and processes discussed in the Cultural Evolutionary literature are related to doxa.