It's Misleading to say Culture Is 'Not Strictly Darwinian'

"Cultural Darwinism has persisted by focusing almost exclusively on the social transmission of clearly delineated cultural units or transmission biases, such as a preference to copy people who are prestigious. In other words, they study cultural change due to things like copying error or signal distortion that occurs when units of culture are en route from one person to another. This is exactly the segment of cultural change that most closely meets the requirements for natural selection to be applicable."

"In Part One of this series, we saw that culture doesn't suffer from the problem that Darwin's theory of natural selection successfully solved: the problem of how change accumulates in biological lineages despite the fact that changes acquired over a lifetime are discarded at the end of that lifetime. We also saw that units of culture don't possess the algorithmic structure of something that can evolve through natural selection."

Culture changes through intelligence, creativity, strategic thinking, and cross-cultural interaction, producing within-generation innovations that are retained. Cultural units do not possess the discrete, algorithmic structure required for natural selection to operate in the same way as biological evolution. Cultural transmission commonly follows network-like, horizontal pathways rather than tree-like branching, and acquired cultural traits can be inherited across individuals. Natural selection models apply only to limited segments of cultural change—primarily copying errors and signal distortion during transmission of clearly delineated units. Emphasizing only those segments yields incomplete and potentially misleading accounts of cultural dynamics.

Read at Psychology Today