For well over a century, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has served as biology’s grand unifying framework, explaining how species adapt and evolve through the differential replication of randomly generated variations. Given the success of the theory of natural selection in biology, it’s natural to wonder whether it might explain another kind of evolution we see all around us: that of human culture.
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Cultural innovations such as technologies, artistic styles, and social practices build on earlier ones, and tend to benefit their bearers, and become more useful over time. Culture exhibits cumulative, adaptive change; it evolves. The question is: How? What kind of scientific framework can accommodate it?
Culture doesn’t face the problem Darwin’s theory was designed to solve, the problem of how change accumulates despite acquired changes getting obliterated each generation. Once someone invented a teapot handle, teapots could thereafter have handles. If we apply natural selection to culture, we’re trying to use a framework specifically designed to explain evolution in systems where acquired traits aren’t transmitted, to explain evolution in a system where they are.
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