The Cultural Evolution of Socially Situated Cognition

TL;DR

This paper proposes a non-Darwinian model of cultural evolution, emphasizing the autopoietic transformation of the mind and challenging traditional natural selection explanations for cultural change.

Contribution

It introduces a novel autopoietic framework for understanding cultural evolution, focusing on mind transformation rather than discrete lineage selection.

Findings

Culture evolves through mind actualization, not natural selection.

Ideas and artifacts reflect the current state of the evolved mind.

Cultural change involves interaction and influence among elements, not inheritance of traits.

Abstract

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is therefore commonly thought that elements of culture evolve through natural selection. However, natural selection was proposed to explain how change accumulates despite lack of inheritance of acquired traits, as occurs with template-mediated replication. It cannot accommodate a process with significant retention of acquired or horizontally (e.g. socially) transmitted traits. Moreover, elements of culture cannot be treated as discrete lineages because they constantly interact and influence one another. It is proposed that what evolves through culture is the mind; ideas and artifacts are merely reflections of its current evolved state. Interacting minds transform (in part) through through a non-Darwinian autopoietic process similar to that by which early life evolved, involving not survival of the fittest but actualization of their potential.