The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Facilitates Evolutionary Models of Culture Change

Cameron M Smith,Liane Gabora,William Gardner-O’Kearny

doi:10.21237/c7clio9235187

Cameron M Smith, Liane Gabora + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.21237/c7clio9235187

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Abstract

Author(s): Smith, Cameron M.; Gabora, Liane; Gardner-O’Kearny, William | Abstract: The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is beginning to fulfill the whole promise of Darwinian insight through its extension of evolutionary understanding from the biological domain to include cultural information evolution. This constitutes the origins of an evolutionary study of culture change free of the social-darwinism and ecologically-deterministic baggage that characterized earlier such approaches.

Highlights

In recent years, Nature editors declared evolution a fact (2008), and a 2010 Proceedings of the Royal Society [B] symposium titled Culture Evolves extended the evolutionary process to the phenomenon of culture, a socially-transmitted body of information
Many of the mechanisms involved with non-genetic inheritance are not yet fully understood (Bonduriansky 2012; see the new Journal of Non-Genetic Inheritance), nor is the path to integrate the various emerging biological explanations into a cohesive whole apparent (Day and Bonduriansky 2011)
It is one of the ironies in the history of anthropology that even though many of the processes involved with cultural evolution are perfect examples of the concepts research in biological heredity are trying to understand attempts to conform to the Modern Synthesis model of evolution have kept anthropology from taking the leading role of studying cultural evolution that it might otherwise have taken (Tomczyk 2006)

Summary

Introduction

Nature editors declared evolution a fact (2008), and a 2010 Proceedings of the Royal Society [B] symposium titled Culture Evolves extended the evolutionary process to the phenomenon of culture, a socially-transmitted body of information. Another major difference between cultural and biological evolution is that culture (extrasomatic information) can be transmitted horizontally among members of a given generation and has long been called fundamentally nonevolutionary in its processes.

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Conclusion