"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 changes acquired over a lifetime being 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. In this post, we see how culture violates the requirements that make natural selection an applicable model."
"A model is an artificial construct; no process adheres to a model exactly. Biological evolution adheres to the conditions for natural selection sufficiently well that it serves as a useful approximation, but cultural evolution does not. A model that captures the skeletal essence of the process increases understanding because it enables us to vary one part of the model and see how other parts are affected."
Culture deviates from patterns required for natural selection, undermining the explanatory power of Darwinian models for cultural change. Cultural variation often departs from randomness, cultural units lack discrete, high-fidelity replication, and horizontal transmission generates similarity independent of common ancestry. Biological evolution approximates the conditions necessary for natural selection, allowing useful modeling, but cultural evolution fails to meet those conditions. Using a model that captures key mechanisms clarifies relationships between processes, whereas applying an inappropriate Darwinian model to culture obscures differences and risks conflating horizontal transfer with inheritance, producing misleading conclusions.
Read at Psychology Today
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