15 - Cultural Evolution

Summary

The chapter discusses the field of cultural evolution, which emerged in the wake of sociobiology and alongside evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology in the 1970s. Cultural evolution theory can be divided into three parts: investigating the genetic evolution of psychological capacities underlying culture, studying how populations adapt to their environments, and exploring how genes and culture influence each other’s evolutionary dynamics. The first sections of the chapter examine how human culture differs from nonhuman culture, why and how culture evolved in humans during the Pleistocene, how our cultural capacity predisposed us to be cooperative, and how cultural group selection created the conditions for the genetic evolution of prosocial preferences. Addressing a common criticism that cultural evolution focuses too heavily on mathematical modeling, subsequent sections showcase the recent explosion of empirical research that has been inspired by cultural evolutionary theory. This research is divided into three methods: fieldwork, experiments, and phylogenetics. The chapter concludes by noting that the dividing lines between cultural evolution and human behavioral ecology are blurring, with students of each subfield increasingly borrowing from the other, suggesting that these labels may soon be obsolete.