Light Will be Thrown: The Emerging Science of Cultural Evolution

TL;DR

This paper discusses how cultural evolution follows Darwinian principles, involving cumulative selection and inheritance, and traces the development of this scientific approach from its origins to current research.

Contribution

It provides a concise overview of how the concept of cultural evolution has developed into a scientific framework based on Darwinian principles.

Findings

Culture evolves through cumulative selection processes.

Cultural evolution can be traced through phylogenetic lineages.

The scientific study of cultural evolution has significantly advanced recently.

Abstract

Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection processes in which information (whether genetic or cultural) is sieved, retained and then transmitted to the next generation. In both domains such a process will result in recognizable lineages and tree-like phylogenies so characteristic of Darwinian evolution. Because a principle of inheritance (i.e., faithful replication of information) holds in both domains, we may trace back particular transmission histories and identify the forces that influenced them. The idea that culture evolves is quite old, but only in recent years there has been a serious effort to turn this idea into science. This article offers a concise analysis of how a rudimentary idea gradually evolved into a thriving research program.