Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution
Abstract
Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations; (4) the "cultural fitness" of a mental representation can be inferred from its successful transmission; and (5) selective forces only matter if the sources of variation are random. We close by sketching the outlines of a unified evolutionary science of culture.
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Cultural traits can replicate through a systemic process without gene-like replicators.
“it is possible for the replication of cultural traits to be a systemic process without the need for gene-like replicators (Henrich et al. 2008; Laland & Brown 2011).”
From Evolving the future: Toward a science of intentional change (2014) · cites this paper as Henrich et al. 2008
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- Authors
- Henrich, J., Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J.
- Affiliations
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- University of California, Los Angeles (US)
- University of California, Davis (US)
- Corresponding author
- Henrich, Joseph
- Venue
- Human Nature
- Published
- 2008-04-19
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 119-137
- ISSN
- 1045-6767 (ISSN-L)
- 1936-4776
- OpenAlex
- W2126674924
- Cited by
- 360
- References
- 108
- Citations by year
- 2026: 20 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 44 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 45 · 2017: 18 · 2016: 21 · 2015: 21 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 9 · 2012: 16
- FWCI
- 407.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Human Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
- Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Keywords
- cultural evolution, memetics, replicators, mental representation, cumulative cultural evolution, cultural transmission, psychological biases, Darwinian evolution
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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