Biology and Philosophy 23 (2):243-255 (2008)
Abstract |
Critics of Darwinian cultural evolution frequently assert that whereas biological evolution is blind and undirected, cultural change is directed or guided by people who possess foresight, thereby invalidating any Darwinian analysis of culture. Here I show this argument to be erroneous and unsupported in several respects. First, critics commonly conflate human foresight with supernatural clairvoyance, resulting in the premature rejection of Darwinian cultural evolution on false logical grounds. Second, the presence of foresight is perfectly consistent with Darwinian evolution, and is found in biology, in the form of open, teleonomic processes such as genetically-biased behavioural learning. Finally, empirical evidence from the social sciences suggests that cultural change appears far less guided and directed, and human foresight far less accurate, than is commonly assumed.
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Keywords | Cultural evolution Foresight Human culture Mental time travel Niche construction Planning Teleology Teleonomy |
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DOI | 10.1007/s10539-007-9097-3 |
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References found in this work BETA
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic & Amos Tversky (eds.) - 1982 - Cambridge University Press.
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman - 1974 - Science 185 (4157):1124-1131.
Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd - 2005 - Chicago University Press.
The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection of the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.Charles Darwin - 1859 - Norton.
The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance.Ernst Mayr - 1982 - Belknap Press, 1982.
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Citations of this work BETA
Is Cultural Fitness Hopelessly Confused?Grant Ramsey & Andreas De Block - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2).
When Will a Darwinian Approach Be Useful for the Study of Society?Samuel Bagg - 2017 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 16 (3):259-281.
Darwinian 'Blind' Hypothesis Formation Revisited.Maria E. Kronfeldner - 2010 - Synthese 175 (2):193--218.
Darwinism Extended: A Survey of How the Idea of Cultural Evolution Evolved.Chris Buskes - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (3):661-691.
Investigating How Cultural Transmission Leads to the Appearance of Design Without a Designer in Human Communication Systems.Hannah Cornish - 2010 - Interaction Studies 11 (1):112-137.
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