Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:45:43.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Evolutionary Culture Concepts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Abstract

Most attempts to define culture as used in the cultural evolution literature treat culture as a single phenomenon that can be given a single nondisjunctive definition. In this article I argue that, really, cultural evolutionists employ a variety of distinct but closely related concepts of culture. I show how the main prominent attempts to define a culture concept fail to properly capture all the uses of “culture” employed in cultural evolutionary work. I offer a description of some of the most important culture concepts used by cultural evolutionists.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aoki, Kenichi, and Feldman, Marcus W.. 2013. “Evolution of Learning Strategies in Temporally and Spatially Variable Environments: A Review of Theory.” Theoretical Population Biology 91:319.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Aoki, Kenichi, Shida, Mitsuo, and Shigesada, Nanako. 1996. “Travelling Wave Solutions for the Spread of Farmers into a Region Occupied by Hunter-Gatherers.” Theoretical Population Biology 50:117.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Atran, Scott. 2001. “The Trouble with Memes: Inference Verses Imitation in Cultural Creation.” Human Nature 12 (4): 351–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackmore, Susan. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bowles, Samuel. 2006. “Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism.” Science 314:1569–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bowles, Samuel, and Gintis, Herbert. 2011. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Boyd, Robert, and Richerson, Peter J.. 1985. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Boyd, Robert, and Richerson, Peter J. 1996. “Why Culture Is Common, but Cultural Evolution Is Rare.” Proceedings of the British Academy 88:7793.Google Scholar
Boyer, Pascal. 1999. “Cognitive Tracks of Cultural Inheritance: How Evolved Intuitive Ontology Governs Cultural Transmission.” American Anthropologist 100 (4): 876–89.Google Scholar
Burian, Richard M. 1985. “On Conceptual Change in Biology: The Case of the Gene.” In Evolution at a Crossroads, ed. Depew, D. and Weber, B., 2142. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chudek, Maciej, and Henrich, Joseph. 2014. “Tackling Group-Level Traits by Starting at the Start.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (3): 257–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Claidiere, Nicolas, and Sperber, Dan. 2007. “The Role of Attraction in Cultural Evolution.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 7:89111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawkins, Richard. 1999. “Foreword.” In The Meme Machine, ed. Blackmore, S., vii–xvii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Durham, William H. 1991. Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human Diversity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Eren, Metin I., Buchanan, Briggs, and O’Brien, Michael J.. 2015. “Social Learning and Technological Evolution during the Clovis Colonization of the New World.” Journal of Human Evolution 80:159–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ereshefsky, Mark. 2014. “Consilience, Historicity, and the Species Problem.” In Evolutionary Biology: Conceptual, Ethical, and Religious Issues, ed. Thompson, R. P. and Walsh, D., 6586. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, Marcus W., and Laland, Kevin N.. 1996. “Gene-Culture Coevolutionary Theory.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 11 (11): 453–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fracchia, Joseph, and Lewontin, Richard C.. 1999. “Does Culture Evolve?History and Theory 38 (4): 5278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galef, Bennett G. Jr. 1992. “The Question of Animal Culture.” Human Nature 3 (2): 157–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Griffiths, Paul, and Stotz, Karola. 2007. “Gene.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, ed. Hull, D. L. and Ruse, M., 85102. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Joseph. 2004. “Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses—the Tasmanian Case.” American Antiquity 69 (2): 197214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Joseph, and Boyd, Robert. 1998. “The Evolution of Conformist Transmission and the Emergence of between-Group Differences.” Evolution and Human Behavior 19:215–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Joseph, and Boyd, Robert 2001a. “Weak Conformist Transmission Can Stabilize Costly Enforcement Norms in Cooperative Dilemmas.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 208:7989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Joseph, and Boyd, Robert 2001b. “Why People Punish Defectors: Weak Conformist Transmission Can Stabilize Costly Enforcement of Norms in Cooperative Dilemmas.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 208 (1): 7989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Joseph, and Boyd, Robert 2002. “On Modeling Cognition and Culture.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 2:87112.Google Scholar
Henrich, Joseph, and Boyd, Robert 2008. “Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, and the Evolution of Social Stratification.” Current Anthropology 49 (4): 715–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, Joseph, Boyd, Robert, and Richerson, Peter J.. 2008. “Five Misunderstandings about Cultural Evolution.” Human Nature 19:119–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henrich, Joseph, and Gil-White, Francisco J.. 2001. “The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission.” Evolution and Human Behavior 22:165–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heyes, Cecilia. 2012. “What’s Social about Social Learning?Journal of Comparative Psychology 126 (2): 193202.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hull, David. 1988. “Interactors vs. Vehicles.” In The Role of Behavior in Evolution, ed. Plotkin, H. C., 1950. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Ingold, Tim. 2007. “The Trouble with ‘Evolutionary Biology.’Anthropology Today 23 (2): 1317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jablonka, Eva, and Lamb, Marion J.. 2005. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jordan, Peter, and Shennan, Stephen. 2003. “Cultural Transmission, Language, and Basketry Traditions amongst the California Indians.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22 (1): 4274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laland, Kevin N., and Brown, Gillian R.. 2002. Sense and Nonsense. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Laland, Kevin N., and Hoppitt, William. 2003. “Do Animals Have Culture?Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (3): 150–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laland, Kevin N., Odling-Smee, John, and Feldman, Marcus W.. 2000. “Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and Cultural Change.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23:131–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Odling-Smee, John, and Feldman, Marcus W. 2001. “Cultural Niche Construction and Human Evolution.” Journal of Evolutionary Biology 14:2233.Google Scholar
Lewens, Tim. 2015. Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lycett, Stephen J., Collard, Mark, and McGrew, William C.. 2009. “Cladistic Analyses of Behavioural Variation in Wild Pan Troglodytes: Exploring the Chimpanzee Culture Hypothesis.” Journal of Human Evolution 57:337–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lycett, Stephen J., and von Cramon-Taubadel, Noreen. 2008. “Acheulean Variability and Hominin Dispersals: A Model-Bound Approach.” Journal of Archaeological Science 35 (3): 553–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matthews, Luke, Tehrani, Jamie, Jordan, F., and Collard, Mark. 2011. “Testing for Divergent Transmission Histories among Cultural Characters: A Study Using Bayesian Phylogenetic Methods and Iranian Tribal Textile Data.” PLoS ONE 6 (4): 110.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mesoudi, Alex. 2011. Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mesoudi, Alex, Whiten, Andrew, and Laland, Kevin N.. 2006. “Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29:329–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Odling-Smee, John, and Laland, Kevin N.. 2011. “Ecological Inheritance and Cultural Inheritance: What Are They and How Do They Differ?Biological Theory 6:220–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Odling-Smee, John, Laland, Kevin N., and Feldman, Marcus W.. 2003. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Okasha, Samir. 2006. Evolution and the Levels of Selection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramsey, Grant. 2013. “Culture in Humans and Other Animals.” Biology and Philosophy 28:457–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richerson, Peter J., and Boyd, Robert. 2000. “Climate, Culture and the Evolution of Cognition.” In The Evolution of Cognition, ed. Heyes, C. and Huber, L., 329–46. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Huber, L. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sober, Elliott, and Wilson, David Sloan. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Soltis, Joseph, Boyd, Robert, and Richerson, Peter J.. 1995. “Can Group Functional Behaviors Evolve by Cultural Group Selection?Current Anthropology 36 (3): 473–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan 2000. “An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture.” In Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, ed. Aunger, R., 163–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Claidiere, Nicolas. 2008. “Defining and Explaining Culture: Comments on Richerson and Boyd, Not by Genes Alone.Biology and Philosophy 23:283–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sterelny, Kim. 2012. The Evolved Apprentice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stotz, Karola, and Griffiths, Paul. 2004. “Genes: Philosophical Analyses Put to the Test.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 26 (1): 528.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tooby, John, and Cosmides, Leda. 1992. “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” In The Adapted Mind, ed. Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J., 19136. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Whiten, A., Goodall, J., McGrew, W. C., Nishida, T., Reynolds, V., Sugiyama, Y., Tutin, C. E. G., Wrangham, R. W., and Boesch, C.. 2001. “Charting Cultural Variation in Chimpanzees.” Behaviour 138:14811516.Google Scholar
Whiten, Andrew. 2000. “Primate Culture and Social Learning.” Cognitive Science 24 (3): 477508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, David Sloan. 2002. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar