Related papers: How a Generation Was Misled About Natural Selectio…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons…
Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
Evolution by natural selection can be seen an algorithm for generating creative solutions to difficult problems. More precisely, evolution by natural selection is a class of algorithms that share a set of properties. The question we address…
Dawkins' replicator-based conception of evolution has led to widespread mis-application selectionism across the social sciences because it does not address the paradox that inspired the theory of natural selection in the first place: how do…
Kin selection theory is a kind of causal analysis. The initial form of kin selection ascribed cause to costs, benefits, and genetic relatedness. The theory then slowly developed a deeper and more sophisticated approach to partitioning the…
The commentators have brought a wealth of new perspectives to the question of how culture evolves. Each of their diverse disciplines--ranging from psychology to biology to anthropology to economics to engineering--has a valuable…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Species coexistence is one of the central themes in modern ecology. Coexistence is a prerequisite of biological diversity. However, the question arises how biodiversity can be reconciled with the statement of competition theory, which…
The equations of evolutionary change by natural selection are commonly expressed in statistical terms. Fisher's fundamental theorem emphasizes the variance in fitness. Quantitative genetics expresses selection with covariances and…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
Categorization is a fundamental function of minds, with wide ranging implications for the rest of the cognitive system. In humans, categories are shared and communicated between minds, thus requiring explanations at the population level. In…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
Dunnell's (1989) explanation for cultural elaboration proposed that elaboration could be a consequence of selection within uncertain environments. He developed the theory to the extent that it performed well explaining the distribution of…
Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…