ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Selection, adaptation, inheritance and design in human culture: the view from the Price equation.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- How does stochasticity in learning impact the accumulation of knowledge and the evolution of learning?Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Does literature evolve one funeral at a time?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Major transitions in sociocultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Cultural attraction in pottery practice: Group-specific shape transformations by potters from three communities.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Steps to individuality in biology and culture.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cultural evolution from the producers' standpoint.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Quantifying the Selective, Stochastic, and Complementary Drivers of Institutional Evolution in Online Communities.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Overcoming Individual Limitations Through Distributed Computation: Rational Information Accumulation in Multigenerational Populations.Topics in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Cultural selection and biased transformation: two dynamics of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Human biases limit cumulative innovation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Culture without copying or selection.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to "Cumulative Cultural Evolution?"Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Different perspectives on non-genetic inheritance illustrate the versatile utility of the Price equation in evolutionary biology.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Fifty years of the Price equation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.