The evolution of ‘culture’: Juggling a concept
- 10 January 2019
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Anthropological Theory
- Vol. 20 (1), 53-76
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618814598
Abstract
Although the concept of culture was severely criticized in the second half of the twentieth century, its explanatory use has not been abandoned. Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists have more recently used the concept in models and theories of culture. This use renews the hope that the concept of culture can be explanatorily useful within the social sciences, especially since the new definition of culture connects with both the idea of evolution and with the other natural sciences. In this paper, I analyze the models of cultural evolution developed by Cultural Evolutionary Science (CES), more specifically gene-culture coevolution theoretical models and dual-inheritance theories. I argue that even if CES scholars mostly claim that for them, culture is equal to information, some of these models have aspirations to bring back cultures as discrete units that resemble the social anthropological models of culture that have been already abandoned. I discuss evolutionists’ and social anthropologists’ objections to these models. I claim that despite the popularity of cultural evolutionist theories, social scientists (cultural anthropologists and historians, for example) should remain skeptical about the possibility that this approach can assume an explanatory role for a concept of culture.Keywords
Funding Information
- Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové
This publication has 69 references indexed in Scilit:
- Darwinism Extended: A Survey of How the Idea of Cultural Evolution EvolvedPhilosophia, 2013
- Implications for health and disease in the genetic signature of the Ashkenazi Jewish populationGenome Biology, 2012
- The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptationProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011
- The Domain of the ReplicatorsCurrent Anthropology, 2011
- The LRRK2 G2019S mutation as the cause of Parkinson’s disease in Ashkenazi JewsJournal of Neural Transmission, 2009
- Male dominance rarely skews the frequency distribution of Y chromosome haplotypes in human populationsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008
- Social semantics: how useful has group selection been?Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 2007
- The Cultural Mind: Environmental Decision Making and Cultural Modeling Within and Across Populations.Psychological Review, 2005
- Genes and CulturesCurrent Anthropology, 2003
- ON THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE AND SOME CULTURAL FALLACIES1American Anthropologist, 1944