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      Selection, adaptation, inheritance and design in human culture: the view from the Price equation

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          Abstract

          For decades, parts of the literature on human culture have been gripped by an analogy: culture changes in a way that is substantially isomorphic to genetic evolution. This leads to a number of sub-claims: that design-like properties in cultural traditions should be explained in a parallel way to the design-like features of organisms, namely with reference to selection; that culture is a system of inheritance; and that cultural evolutionary processes can produce adaptation in the genetic sense. The Price equation provides a minimal description of any evolutionary system, and a method for identifying the action of selection. As such, it helps clarify some of these claims about culture conceptually. Looking closely through the lens of the Price equation, the differences between genes and culture come into sharp relief. Culture is only a system of inheritance metaphorically, or as an idealization, and the idealization may lead us to overlook causally important features of how cultural influence works. Design-like properties in cultural systems may owe more to transmission biases than to cultural selection. Where culture enhances genetic fitness, it is ambiguous whether what is doing the work is cultural transmission, or just the genetically evolved properties of the mind. I conclude that there are costs to trying to press culture into a template based on Darwinian evolution, even if one broadens the definition of ‘Darwinian’.

          This article is part of the theme issue ‘Fifty years of the Price equation’.

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          Towards a unified science of cultural evolution.

          We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in "social cognitive neuroscience," although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences.
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            A problem in theory

            The replication crisis facing the psychological sciences is widely regarded as rooted in methodological or statistical shortcomings. We argue that a large part of the problem is the lack of a cumulative theoretical framework or frameworks. Without an overarching theoretical framework that generates hypotheses across diverse domains, empirical programs spawn and grow from personal intuitions and culturally biased folk theories. By providing ways to develop clear predictions, including through the use of formal modelling, theoretical frameworks set expectations that determine whether a new finding is confirmatory, nicely integrating with existing lines of research, or surprising, and therefore requiring further replication and scrutiny. Such frameworks also prioritize certain research foci, motivate the use diverse empirical approaches and, often, provide a natural means to integrate across the sciences. Thus, overarching theoretical frameworks pave the way toward a more general theory of human behaviour. We illustrate one such a theoretical framework: dual inheritance theory.
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              Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, part I

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
                Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci
                RSTB
                royptb
                Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
                The Royal Society
                0962-8436
                1471-2970
                27 April 2020
                9 March 2020
                9 March 2020
                : 375
                : 1797 , Theme issue ‘Fifty years of the Price equation’ compiled and edited by Jussi Lehtonen, Samir Okasha and Heikki Helanterä
                : 20190358
                Affiliations
                Institute of Population Health Sciences, Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, UK
                Author notes

                One contribution of 16 to a theme issue ‘ Fifty years of the Price equation’.

                Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4834125.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9089-2599
                Article
                rstb20190358
                10.1098/rstb.2019.0358
                7133501
                32146878
                42c95beb-c8d7-41e5-ba35-c92546cdcace
                © 2020 The Authors.

                Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 24 October 2019
                Categories
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                Custom metadata
                April 27, 2020

                Philosophy of science
                cultural evolution,cognition,selection,price equation
                Philosophy of science
                cultural evolution, cognition, selection, price equation

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