Biology and Philosophy 30 (4):481-503 (2015)
Abstract |
Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied
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Keywords | Cultural attraction Cultural attractors Cultural evolution Cultural transmission |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
ISBN(s) | |
DOI | 10.1007/s10539-015-9490-2 |
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References found in this work BETA
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Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd - 2005 - Chicago University Press.
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Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.Pascal Boyer - 2001 - Basic Books.
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Citations of this work BETA
Knowledge From Vice: Deeply Social Epistemology.Neil Levy & Mark Alfano - 2020 - Mind 129 (515):887-915.
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The Philosophical Interpretation of Language Game Theory.Nick Zangwill - 2021 - Journal of Language Evolution 6 (2):136–153.
The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.Claudio Tennie, Elisa Bandini, Carel P. Van Schaik & Lydia M. Hopper - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-42.
View all 25 citations / Add more citations
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