Cultural evolution

Cultural evolution is the idea that cultural change constitutes an evolutionary process. As such, we can use evolutionary tools, concepts, and methods to study cultural change and diversity in humans and other species. Culture is here typically defined broadly as any socially learned information, encompassing beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, skills, norms, languages, institutional rules, and anything else transmitted socially (e.g., via imitation, language, or teaching) from one individual to another. This social transmission constitutes an inheritance process, one that operates in parallel to genetic inheritance. When culturally inherited information varies across individuals or groups and changes over time in response to various factors, we can say that culture evolves. Despite the basic analogy with genetic evolution, there are many differences between cultural and genetic evolution. For example, genetic information is transmitted in humans from parent to offspring, whereas cultural information can be acquired from many more sources such as teachers, peers, books, or the internet. Finally, cultural evolution researchers also study the evolutionary origins of the capacity for culture, by studying the cultural capacities of different species, and evidence for culture in the paleoanthropological and archaeological records.

In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press