Abstract
Social scientists have long remarked that there is consistency in what people believe and value over time, especially within definable groups. Anthropologists call this body of information “culture .” There are (at least) three causal mechanisms that can explain the recurrence of cultural traits . Recurrence can occur through (1) strong individual learning biases ; (2) population-level normalizing effects on what is adopted; and (3) replicator-based inheritance . Each of these mechanisms is favored by a particular brand of evolutionary theorizing about human society. Evolutionary psychologists (EPs) advocate the first option, which emphasizes the ability of universal structures in the evolved mind to come up with the same responses to environmental conditions time and again. What explains cultural consistency over time, then, is evolved psychological decision-making processes in the face of common environmental challenges. A group I call “cultural selectionists ” (CSs) prefer the second option, which notes that even poor social learning abilities can still produce consistently shared features at the level of the group if there are widely shared psychological preferences for traits or the types of individuals from whom to acquire culture. The third option, based on replication of the same information from generation to generation, is the memetic position. In this scenario, the cultural features that keep popping up are the phenotypic expressions of memes , or cultural replicators, disseminating through the population via social communication or mediated transmission via information machines such as computer networks. This variety in the possible explanations for cultural evolution is not generally recognized nor do advocates of one position generally acknowledge the validity of others. But I will argue in this chapter that all three of these possibilities are viable in our present state of ignorance about the means through which cultural traits reappear each generation; any one of them may account for a particular aspect of cultural inheritance .
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Notes
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In a similar fashion, prions only account for a small proportion of diseases, but the peculiar pathologies they do cause – transmissible spongiform encephalopathies like “mad cow” disease – nevertheless represent an interesting species of disease which requires its own kinds of analysis and treatment. The same would be true of memetic culture: significant interest would attend the discovery of memes, and projects to uncover the replicative abilities of cultural traits and the unique kinds of dynamics they introduce would naturally develop.
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A previous version of this chapter was profitably read by Robert Boyd, Dan Sperber, and Ned Kock.
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Aunger, R. (2010). Three Roads to Cultural Recurrence. In: Kock, N. (eds) Evolutionary Psychology and Information Systems Research. Integrated Series in Information Systems, vol 24. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6139-6_16
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