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Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". [1] Cultural evolution is the change of this information ...
Marshall Sahlins, co-editor with Elman Service of Evolution and Culture (1960), divided the evolution of societies into 'general' and 'specific'. [70] General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization and adaptiveness to environment. [70]
Cultural selection theory has so far never been a separate discipline. [2] However it has been proposed [3] that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and "the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution". [3]
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, [1] was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution.
Cultural evolution is not the same as biological evolution: human culture involves the transmission of cultural information (compare memetics), and such transmission can behave in ways quite distinct from human biology and genetics. The study of cultural change increasingly takes place through cladistics and genetic models.
While cultural evolution itself is a much older topic, with a history that dates back at least as far as Darwin's era, Dawkins (1976) proposed that the meme is a unit of culture residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution.
Transmitted cultural behaviors are those behaviors which are learned from one’s social group, regardless of environment. As such, investigating evoked culture may well rest in the domain of evolutionary psychology and transmitted culture studied by culture evolution, social psychology, and other disciplines.
Cultural group selection is an explanatory model within cultural evolution of how cultural traits evolve according to the competitive advantage they bestow upon a group. . This multidisciplinary approach to the question of human culture engages research from the fields of anthropology, behavioural economics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, sociology, and psycho