Culture theory: The developing synthesis from biology

Abstract

This paper was invited as a discussion and critique of the preceding four papers. We have used it to take up the issue of whether the seemingly disparate approaches to culture theory from modern evolutionary biology can be reconciled and unified, and if so, how it can be done. Some of the differences, we think, exist chiefly in the minds of the investigators, perhaps as aspects of professional competition; some may arise from underlying ideological differences; and still others are apparently semantic. A few differences remain, however, that can be resolved only by showing that someone is wrong. All four papers are efforts to analyze the mechanisms of cultural transmission and change. This development is a logical next step in the progress toward understanding the meaning of recent advances in evolutionary biology for the problem of culture, and in the actual analysis of culture. It is appropriate that the initial question asked by this new wave of culture theorists was: Is culture adaptive in the new sense of that term from biology? We believe that the answer to this question has been established as affirmative in a sufficiently general sense to show that the new theories from biology are on the right course (e.g., Alexander, 1977, 1979a; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981; Chagnon, 1979, 1981; Daly and Wilson, 1978, 1981; Dickemann, 1979, 1981; Durham, 1976-1981; Flinn, 1981; Hames, 1979; Irons, 1979a, 1979b, 1981; Lumsden and Wilson, 1981). We hope that our comments here, while deliberately critical, will be recognized as part of the same general approach adopted by all of the authors represented in the four papers we are discussing, as well as those