Why does cultural selection need to be blind?

Abstract

It is standard to understand natural selection as necessarily being blind or, to put it in less ableist terms, to exclude intentional design. Social scientists often critique cultural evolution theory as being redundant, on the grounds that the relevant explanatory work can be done in terms of intentional decisions made by humans. Cultural evolutionists often seek examples of outcomes that plausibly cannot be viewed as intentional – for example, Henrich focusses on the evolution of manioc processing, where the explanation of the benefits is thought to be opaque to most participants (Henrich 2017). Mesoudi 2008 gives us reason to think that intentional design should not guide the production of variants. But less has been said about why intention must be excluded when it comes to the selection of variants, as in cases of ‘direct bias’ (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Amundsen 1989). I argue that we should resist this, and simply view intentional action by humans as one possible driver of a selection process. From the perspective of Universal Darwinism, as long as there is heredity and variation in copy rate, the presence of intention in an evolutionary process is irrelevant. If I am right, then a major source of skepticism about the value of cultural evolution theory in explaining processes such as the workings of science can be undercut, and the evidence base for cultural evolution theory hugely expanded. Intentional design need not exclude cultural evolution, but can, instead, be understood as one of its variables.