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Cultural Extensions

Darwinian thinking has been extended beyond biology into the study of culture, psychology, economics, and elsewhere. Some extensions carry serious empirical research programmes; others are weaker analogies that have not been highly productive. The interesting analytical question running through all of them is what makes a domain genuinely Darwinian — subject to variation, selection, and retention in a way that produces cumulative change — rather than merely changing over time.

Memes

Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the “meme” in The Selfish Gene (1976) — a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the gene: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” Tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions, and techniques of making pots were Dawkins’ examples.

Daniel Dennett developed the idea philosophically in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), and Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999) attempted a book-length treatment of culture as meme replication. The critical reception was substantial. Dan Sperber (Explaining Culture, 1996) argued that cultural transmission is not replication in the genetic sense — ideas are transformed in transmission, not copied; there is no clean replicator-vehicle distinction; the fidelity conditions that make genetic inheritance Darwinian do not hold for cultural transmission. Scott Atran made similar arguments from the study of religion.

As an empirical research programme, strong memetics — the study of culture through discrete, gene-like replicating units — has not been highly productive. The term “meme” has had a longer afterlife in popular usage (particularly internet culture) than in academic study. The concept is better understood as a suggestive analogy that opened a question — can culture be studied in Darwinian terms? — than as a framework that answered it.

Cultural evolution

The serious empirical programme for studying culture in evolutionary terms comes not from memetics but from the dual-inheritance tradition. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman’s Cultural Transmission and Evolution (1981) and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson’s Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) established the framework: humans inherit both genetically and culturally, the two systems interact, and cultural transmission has its own dynamics — conformist bias, prestige bias, frequency-dependent transmission — that differ from genetic inheritance in specifiable ways.

Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success (2015) brought the field to a wider audience, arguing that cumulative culture — the ability to build on and improve the innovations of previous generations — is the hallmark of human cognition and the key to the species’ ecological success. Humans are not individually smarter than their environments require; they are collectively smarter because cultural learning accumulates solutions no individual could discover alone.

Gene-culture coevolution — the interaction between genetic and cultural inheritance — is illustrated by the textbook case of lactase persistence. In populations with a long history of dairying (parts of Europe, East Africa, the Middle East), a genetic mutation allowing adults to digest lactose has spread under selection — a case where a cultural practice (pastoralism) created the selection pressure that drove genetic change.

Evolutionary psychology

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby’s research programme, articulated in The Adapted Mind (1992), proposed that the human mind contains evolved, domain-specific cognitive adaptations — “modules” shaped by natural selection in ancestral environments. Cheater-detection mechanisms, mate-preference heuristics, fear responses calibrated to ancestral threats — each is hypothesised to be a product of selection operating on psychological traits in the Pleistocene environment of evolutionary adaptedness.

Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002) popularised the programme widely. The field is mainstream within parts of psychology and has generated productive research in areas including kin recognition, disgust, jealousy, and social exchange.

The criticism has been substantial. David Buller’s Adapting Minds (2005) challenged the field on methodological grounds — arguing that many of its central claims rest on “just-so stories” that are not empirically testable, that the ancestral environment is too poorly known to support confident claims about what was adaptive, and that the modularity thesis is not well supported by cognitive neuroscience. Richard Lewontin and Jerry Fodor raised theoretical objections: Lewontin against adaptationism generally (the assumption that every trait is an adaptation), Fodor against massive modularity specifically.

Evolutionary psychology’s standing is genuinely contested within psychology and philosophy of science. It has defenders and critics of comparable seriousness, and the dispute concerns both the theoretical framework and the quality of the empirical evidence.

Evolutionary economics

The question of whether economics could be an evolutionary science is older than the Modern Synthesis. Thorstein Veblen asked “Why is economics not an evolutionary science?” in 1898, arguing that neoclassical economics’ equilibrium framework missed the dynamic, cumulative, and path-dependent character of economic change. Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction — the constant revolutionising of economic structure from within — drew on evolutionary metaphors, though Schumpeter was not a Darwinian in a technical sense.

Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter’s An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982) developed the most systematic evolutionary economics, modelling firms as organisms with routines (analogous to genes) that are selected by market competition. Geoffrey Hodgson has written extensively on the relationship between economic and biological evolution, arguing for a “generalised Darwinism” that applies variation-selection-retention principles to economic as well as biological populations.

The analogy between economic competition and natural selection is suggestive but imperfect. Firms can change their routines intentionally (a Lamarckian, not Darwinian, mechanism); economic “mutations” (innovations) are often directed rather than random; and market environments are themselves shaped by the actors competing within them (a form of niche construction). Whether these differences are decisive or accommodable is part of the ongoing discussion.

Universal Darwinism

The strongest claim about the scope of Darwinian thinking is universal Darwinism — the thesis that variation, selection, and retention constitute a substrate-neutral algorithm applicable wherever cumulative change occurs. Dawkins gestured toward this in his concept of “replicators”; Dennett developed it in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), arguing that natural selection is a “universal acid” dissolving traditional boundaries between the biological and the cultural; David Hull’s Science as a Process (1988) applied selection theory to the evolution of scientific ideas.

The opposing view holds that genuine Darwinian dynamics require specific conditions that not all cumulative-change domains meet. Sperber argued that culture lacks the high-fidelity replication that makes biological evolution Darwinian. Lewontin maintained that extending Darwinian logic beyond biology conflates the mechanism with a metaphor. The question is whether the variation-selection-retention pattern picks out a real, substrate-neutral process or whether “selection” in non-biological domains is an analogy that obscures more than it reveals.

Universal Darwinism is a contested philosophical position, not a scientific consensus. Its proponents see it as the natural extension of Darwin’s insight; its critics see it as an overextension that flattens important differences between domains.

Where the analogies are productive and where they break

The productive core across all these extensions is population thinking — the recognition that change in a population of varying entities under differential persistence has a logic that can be studied and modelled. Lineage analysis, the variation-selection-retention pattern as an analytical tool, and the recognition of cumulative change as a distinct kind of process are genuinely useful across domains.

Where the analogies break or are contested: cultural transmission is not gene-like in important ways. It has multiple parents (we learn from many sources, not two). It is lateral as well as vertical (peer transmission, media, institutions). It permits intentional modification — cultural “traits” can be redesigned by their carriers, a Lamarckian feature absent from genetic inheritance. There is no clean replicator-vehicle distinction in culture. Whether these differences make cultural change non-Darwinian or merely differently Darwinian is the live question.

Sources

See also: Spencer · Kauffman · After the Synthesis · Social Darwinism