How Darwinian is cultural evolution?
Open accessAbstract
Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progress has involved idealizing away from phenomena that may be critical to an adequate understanding of culture and cultural evolution, particularly the constructive aspect of the mechanisms of cultural transmission. Taking these aspects into account, we describe cultural evolution in terms of cultural attraction , which is populational and evolutionary, but only selectional under certain circumstances. As such, in order to model cultural evolution, we must not simply adjust existing replicative or selectional models but we should rather generalize them, so that, just as replicator-based selection is one form that Darwinian selection can take, selection itself is one of several different forms that attraction can take. We present an elementary formalization of the idea of cultural attraction.
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Humans may favour machines catering to non-factual stories and narratives that match concepts and ideas preferred by human cognition, such as those appealing to intuitive expectations about the natural world or to specific religious practices.
“For instance, humans may favour machines catering to non-factual stories and narratives that match concepts and ideas preferred by human cognition 157 , such as those appealing to intuitive expectations about the natural world 158,159 or to specific religious practices 160 .”
From Machine culture (2023) · cites this paper as [158]
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“In the following sections, we will first outline the basic tenets of the two approaches, and then move to defend the usefulness of a narrow notion of cultural attraction, as opposed to the broader notion proposed by Sperber and colleagues (e.g. Sperber 1996; Claidière et al. 2014), that we define as extended.”
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- Authors
- Claidière, N., Scott-Phillips, T. C., & Sperber, D.
- Affiliations
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- Evolutionary Anthropology Research Group, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Dawson Building, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK
- Venue
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2014-05-19
- Volume
- 369
- Issue
- 1642
- Pages
- 20130368
- ISSN
- 0962-8436 (ISSN-L)
- 1471-2970
- PMC
- PMC3982669
- OpenAlex
- W2111925413
- Cited by
- 284
- References
- 45
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 36 · 2021: 23 · 2020: 33 · 2019: 41 · 2018: 36 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 17 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 241.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Durham Research Online (Durham University) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- Durham Research Online (Durham University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- HAL (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Economic and Social Research Council (ES/K001647/1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
- Keywords
- cultural evolution, Darwinian selection, cultural attractions, cultural transmission, replicator dynamics, evolutionary models, population thinking
- MeSH terms
- Cultural Evolution, Humans, Models, Theoretical, Population Dynamics
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