An Evolutionary Framework for Culture: Selectionism versus Communal Exchange

TL;DR

This paper argues that cultural evolution is better explained by communal exchange rather than selectionism, highlighting how acquired traits accumulate rapidly and proposing a non-Darwinian framework supported by computational models.

Contribution

It introduces communal exchange as a more suitable evolutionary framework for culture, contrasting it with traditional selectionist models and supporting it with computational and historical analysis.

Findings

Communal exchange better explains cultural evolution than selectionism.

Acquired traits in culture can accumulate faster than inherited traits.

Computational models support the non-Darwinian framework for cultural change.

Abstract

Dawkins' replicator-based conception of evolution has led to widespread mis-application selectionism across the social sciences because it does not address the paradox that inspired the theory of natural selection in the first place: how do organisms accumulate change when traits acquired over their lifetime are obliterated? This is addressed by von Neumann's concept of a self-replicating automaton (SRA). A SRA consists of a self-assembly code that is used in two distinct ways: (1) actively deciphered during development to construct a self-similar replicant, and (2) passively copied to the replicant to ensure that it can reproduce. Information that is acquired over a lifetime is not transmitted to offspring, whereas information that is inherited during copying is transmitted. In cultural evolution there is no mechanism for discarding acquired change. Acquired change can accumulate orders of magnitude faster than, and quickly overwhelm, inherited change due to differential replication of variants in response to selection. This prohibits a selectionist but not an evolutionary framework for culture. Recent work on the origin of life suggests that early life evolved through a non-Darwinian process referred to as communal exchange that does not involve a self-assembly code, and that natural selection emerged from this more haphazard, ancestral evolutionary process. It is proposed that communal exchange provides a more appropriate evolutionary framework for culture than selectionism. This is supported by a computational model of cultural evolution and a network-based program for documenting material cultural history, and it is consistent with high levels of human cooperation.