What is it about?
Human culture is highly variable and complex and is guided by intentional choices which lead to workable solutions but also to much error, redundancy and social harm. Traditional Neo-Darwinist theory which saw cultural traits as adaptive products of natural selection has not had much success in explaining these features. This article takes a new approach designed to account for the complexity of human cultural evolution.
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Why is it important?
Social scientists have generally seen culture as a uniquely human, intentional and conscious creation. By contrast, biologists interested in cultural evolution have had little use for concepts such as intent and consciousness, and have seen culture as an accumulation of fitness-enhancing traits. This article bridges the gap by arguing that cultural evolution is a distinct process where variation and selection take a largely cognitive and intentional form. What unites it with its genetic equivalent is that both follow the first principle of all evolution: to produce blind variety as a response to uncertain, contingent environments.
Perspectives
I see human culture as a natural, evolutionary product, but as a sociologist I am also familiar with its extraordinary complexity. My work aims to find a general theory which combines external and internal selection in a single evolutionary framework. I am using this framework in a forthcoming book entitled 'Origins of Social Inequality in Human Societies' (Routledge) to explain the cultural evolution of social inequality, a particularly complex and divisive feature of human culture.
Professor Bernd Baldus
University of Toronto
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Contingency, novelty and choice. Cultural evolution as internal selection, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, April 2014, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12065.
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