ArticleBiology & philosophy
If we are all cultural Darwinians what's the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.
Article in Biology & philosophy. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- When the City Speaks: How Urban Form Shapes the Cultural Transmission of Spatial Conceptualization.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The cultural macroevolution of arcade video games: innovation, collaboration, and collapse.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Cultural evolution: Where we have been and where we are going (maybe).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Cultural traits operating in senders are driving forces of cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Integrating evolutionary theory and social-ecological systems research to address the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Lessons for Theory from Scientific Domains Where Evidence is Sparse or Indirect.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Article
- Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations.Science advances · 2022Article
- Underappreciated features of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Cultural selection and biased transformation: two dynamics of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to "Cumulative Cultural Evolution?"Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Ethnoscientific expertise and knowledge specialisation in 55 traditional cultures.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Cultural extinction in evolutionary perspective.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- Evaluating the relative contributions of copying and reconstruction processes in cultural transmission episodes.PloS one · 2021Article
- Prestige and content biases together shape the cultural transmission of narratives.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Culture without copying or selection.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- The value of teaching increases with tool complexity in cumulative cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Selection, adaptation, inheritance and design in human culture: the view from the Price equation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.Biology & philosophy · 2020Article
- Enquire within: cultural evolution and cognitive science.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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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