Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges
Tim Lewens
Abstract
This book exposes and evaluates a set of conceptual disputes concerning what we might mean by culture, and how we should go about accounting for it. Its particular focus is a set of evolutionary approaches to the genesis of the human capacity for culture, to subsequent cultural change, and to the ways in which genetic and cultural change interact, or ‘co-evolve’. Debates over the propriety of cultural evolutionary theory have divided biological and social anthropologists. Some of the key conceptual issues raised in this book include the question of whether culture can be defined as ‘informatio ... More
This book exposes and evaluates a set of conceptual disputes concerning what we might mean by culture, and how we should go about accounting for it. Its particular focus is a set of evolutionary approaches to the genesis of the human capacity for culture, to subsequent cultural change, and to the ways in which genetic and cultural change interact, or ‘co-evolve’. Debates over the propriety of cultural evolutionary theory have divided biological and social anthropologists. Some of the key conceptual issues raised in this book include the question of whether culture can be defined as ‘information’, the role of theories of human nature in evolutionary research, the commitments of cultural evolutionary theorists to a form of methodological individualism, the effect of power on evolutionary trends, the use of idealised models for explaining cultural change, the value of adaptationist thinking in exposing our cultural capacities, and the relationship between evolutionary and constructivist conceptions of the emotions. The book as a whole argues that there is little realistic hope that the social sciences might become unified around an evolutionary synthesis. Instead the defence of evolutionary approaches to culture must be more modest in scope. The cultural evolutionary tools of populational modelling and phylogenetic inference are important contributors to the study of cultural change.
Keywords:
cultural evolutionary theory,
adaptationism,
biological anthropology,
social anthropology,
co-evolution,
methodological individualism,
emotion,
model,
human nature
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199674183 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674183.001.0001 |
