ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Pursuing Darwin's curious parallel: Prospects for a science of cultural evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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20 citing papers in PubMed, 150 citations in OpenAlex.
- Adversarial Dynamics in Centralized Versus Decentralized Intelligent Systems.Topics in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Creativity as emulation: the cultural basis of creative cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Machine culture.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
- Cultural evolution with uncertain provision of learning resources.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- The experimental evolution of human culture: flexibility, fidelity and environmental instability.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Expanding the measurement of culture with a sample of two billion humans.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- The future of human behaviour research.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- Cultural selection and biased transformation: two dynamics of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Underappreciated features of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Open-ended cumulative cultural evolution of Hollywood film crews.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- The Development of Cumulative Cultural Learning.Annual review of developmental psychology · 2019Article
- Parasites and politics: why cross-cultural studies must control for relatedness, proximity and covariation.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- What is cumulative cultural evolution?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
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- Cumulative cultural learning: Development and diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- The extension of biology through culture.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Synchronized practice helps bearded capuchin monkeys learn to extend attention while learning a tradition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
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1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
In the past few decades, scholars from several disciplines have pursued the curious parallel noted by Darwin between the genetic evolution of species and the cultural evolution of beliefs, skills, knowledge, languages, institutions, and other forms of socially transmitted information. Here, I review current progress in the pursuit of an evolutionary science of culture that is grounded in both biological and evolutionary theory, but also treats culture as more than a proximate mechanism that is directly controlled by genes. Both genetic and cultural evolution can be described as systems of inherited variation that change over time in response to processes such as selection, migration, and drift. Appropriate differences between genetic and cultural change are taken seriously, such as the possibility in the latter of nonrandomly guided variation or transformation, blending inheritance, and one-to-many transmission. The foundation of cultural evolution was laid in the late 20th century with population-genetic style models of cultural microevolution, and the use of phylogenetic methods to reconstruct cultural macroevolution. Since then, there have been major efforts to understand the sociocognitive mechanisms underlying cumulative cultural evolution, the consequences of demography on cultural evolution, the empirical validity of assumed social learning biases, the relative role of transformative and selective processes, and the use of quantitative phylogenetic and multilevel selection models to understand past and present dynamics of society-level change. I conclude by highlighting the interdisciplinary challenges of studying cultural evolution, including its relation to the traditional social sciences and humanities.
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