Abstract
For decades, parts of the literature on human culture have been gripped by an analogy: culture changes in a way that is substantially isomorphic to genetic evolution. This leads to a number of sub-claims: that design-like properties in cultural traditions should be explained in a parallel way to the design-like features of organisms, namely with reference to selection; that culture is a system of inheritance; and that cultural evolutionary processes can produce adaptation in the genetic sense. The Price equation provides a minimal description of any evolutionary system, and a method for identifying the action of selection. As such, it helps clarify some of these claims about culture conceptually. Looking closely through the lens of the Price equation, the differences between genes and culture come into sharp relief. Culture is only a system of inheritance metaphorically, or as an idealization, and the idealization may lead us to overlook causally important features of how cultural influence works. Design-like properties in cultural systems may owe more to transmission biases than to cultural selection. Where culture enhances genetic fitness, it is ambiguous whether what is doing the work is cultural transmission, or just the genetically evolved properties of the mind. I conclude that there are costs to trying to press culture into a template based on Darwinian evolution, even if one broadens the definition of ‘Darwinian’.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Fifty years of the Price equation’.
Highlights
Parts of the literature on human culture have been gripped by an analogy: culture changes in a way that is substantially isomorphic to genetic evolution
This leads to a number of sub-claims: that design-like properties in cultural traditions should be explained in a parallel way to the design-like features of organisms, namely with reference to selection; that culture is a system of inheritance; and that cultural evolutionary processes can produce adaptation in the genetic sense
It is quite natural, seeing design-like properties in culture, to assume they must be produced by selection processes too. Still another generalization is that cultural evolution can increase genetic fitness. This claim is implicit in the idea that having a second inheritance system is adaptive for coping with environmental fluctuations faster than those that can be tracked by genetic selection, but slower than those generally tracked by individual learning
Summary
Some aspects of human behaviour are not direct consequences of genotype, and yet their properties seem to require appeal to something more than just idiosyncratic learning. Both Californian English and Japanese have super-individual, lineage-like properties not shared by other cases of learning They have recurrent features that span many people and several lifetimes; there is both a chain of inter-personal continuity, and gradual change over time. The key insight of Darwinian genetic evolutionary theory was that design-like properties could be produced, over time, by selection processes. It is quite natural, seeing design-like properties in culture, to assume they must be produced by selection processes too Still another generalization is that cultural evolution can increase genetic fitness. What it will try to do is clarify some of the conceptual questions involved: what would have to be true for culture to constitute a system of inheritance; for design-like features of culture to be explained by selection; for cultural evolution to increase genetic fitness; and for cultural evolution to be Darwinian?
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