Can Darwinian evolution account for cultural change?

Required

• Dennett, DDI, Ch 12 The Cranes of Culture
• Dawkins, ”Memes: The New Replicators”, TSG Ch. 11
• Lewens, T. (2007) 'Cultural Evolution' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Memes: Universal Acid or a Better Mousetrap by Richerson & Boyd. An essay from Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, edited by Robert Aunger. If prompted for a password try username: 'guest' password: 'student'

Recommended

• Atran, S. (2001). The trouble with memes, Human Nature, 12(4), 351-381.
• Blackmore, S. (1998). Imitation and the definition of a meme, Journal of Memetics-Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 2, 159-170.
• Bull, L., Holland, O., & Blackmore, S. (2000). On meme-gene coevolution, Artificial Life, 6(3), 227-235.
• Dawkins, R. (1981). Selfish genes and selfish memes, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, 124–144.
• Friedman, D., & Singh, N. (2004). Negative reciprocity the coevolution of memes and genes, Evolution and Human Behavior, 25(3), 155-173.
• Sterelny, K. (2006). Memes revisited, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 57(1), 145-165.

What reasons are there to think that culture evolves?

1. Certain aspects of culture seem to be fit the Darwinian model of evolution that required variation, heredity and differential fitness.

How might we explain cultural change from an evolutionary point of view?

1. Continue the reductivist account of gene centrism.
2. Continue the reductivist account but introduce memes as an additional replicator.
3. Take a more holistic approach that gives genes and perhaps memes important roles but also emphasizes the other robust regularities (including constraints) involved in evolutionary change.

What arguments are there for considering memes in additions to genes?

1. Some cultural phenomena seem contrary to the interests of genes. For example, celibacy, martyrdom, even altruism.
2. The memetic view reflects the functional organization of the Dawkins gene-centric model: there are replicators and vehicles, defined (as Dennett prefers) in a substrate-neutral way. The same algorithm is at work for more biological and cultural evolution.

What objections can be raised against the concepts of memes?

1. What is a meme?
2. Memes or ideas seem to be semantic entities: their identity and operation seems to depend on what they mean.
3. Memes don't seem to replicate or make copies of themselves. Instead we see associations and blending. We don't easily find lineages of memes, but instead mixtures and associations and entanglements.
4. What makes one meme fitter than another?
5. The evolution seems to be LaMarckian not Darwinian. Acquired traits seem to be selected. The accumulation of adaptations seems very fast.

If not memetics, how might we account for cultural evolution?

1. Niche construction. Organisms sometimes change their environments in ways that make it more hospitable: easier to find resources and easier to reduce threats. This is an example the Dawkins' idea of the extended phenotype. the change in the environment could also then change the sorts of selective pressures the organism faces.
2. Dual inheritance.
   1. Vertical inheritance reflects transfer from parent to child. This is true of genes but could also be true of some skills and knowledge. It could be reliable and would contribute to a diversity of knowledge and skills within a population. It doesn't contribute much to wide-ranging diffusion of skills and knowledge cross a population.
   2. Horizontal inheritance – the transfer of knowledge and skills among nonrelated members of the population in a given generation – would appear to account for faster diffusion of cultural traits.
3. Population thinking. According to Boyd and Richerson population thinking does a better job than natural selection in accounting for cultural change.