Journal
HUMAN NATURE-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY BIOSOCIAL PERSPECTIVE
Volume 19, Issue 2, Pages 119-137Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s12110-008-9037-1
Keywords
dual inheritance theory; memes; cultural evolution; epidemiology of representations; cultural transmission; replicators
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Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations; (4) the cultural fitness of a mental representation can be inferred from its successful transmission; and (5) selective forces only matter if the sources of variation are random. We close by sketching the outlines of a unified evolutionary science of culture.
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