Mesoudi, A. (2016). Cultural evolution: a review of theory, findings, and controversies. Evolutionary Biology, 43(4), 481-497. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11692-015-9320-0

The study of cultural change as a Darwinian evolutionary process has exploded in the last two decades. The author talks about cultural evolution theory, its intellectual background, basic theoretical tenets and methodology, important findings, and important objections and disagreements.

The author defines “culture” as information that is shared socially. The theories of cultural evolution hypothesize that socially transmitted information evolves in the way that Darwin outlined in The Origin of Species, namely, through a system of variation, differential fitness, and inheritance. The author argues, however, that cultural evolution is not neo-Darwinian in the sense that many of the intricacies of genetic evolution may not apply (such as particle inheritance and random mutation).

The author reviews theoretical and empirical studies of cultural microevolution, which include both selection-like processes in which some cultural variants are more likely to be acquired and transmitted than others, as well as transformative processes in which cultural information is altered during transmission. The author also talks about how phylogenetic approaches have been used to figure out how things like language, technology, and social structure have changed over time.

Finally, the author discusses current debates and controversies, such as whether culture is proximate or ultimate, the relative roles of selective and transformative processes in cultural evolution, the basis of cumulative cultural evolution, the evolution of large-scale human cooperation, and whether social learning is learned or innate. In conclusion, the author also emphasizes the need to apply evolutionary approaches to the study of culture in both the social and biological sciences.

Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. (2006). Towards a unified science of cultural evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29(4), 329-347. doi:10.1017/S0140525X06009083

In this article, the authors argue that the framework of a science of cultural evolution should share important elements with the structure of a science of biological evolution since human culture demonstrates key Darwinian evolutionary qualities. They examine this latter claim and define the methodology and procedures used by the major subdisciplines of evolutionary biology, determining if a matching approach to the study of cultural evolution exists or could exist.

The authors explain that existing anthropological and archaeological methodologies are well aligned with macroevolutionary methods such as systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, while mathematical models derived from population genetics have been effectively constructed to analyze cultural microevolution. Experimental simulations and field investigations of cultural microevolution hold a lot of promise, with the opportunity to borrow additional methodologies and assumptions from biology.

Thus, the authors conclude that “social cognitive neuroscience” has the potential to be the cultural counterpart of molecular genetics, while many fundamental challenges remain. It is said that studying culture in a unified evolutionary framework can bring together a lot of different social science fields.