The Evolution of the Capacity for Culture: Sociobiology, Structuralism, and Cultural Selectionism [and Comments and Replies]

Abstract

Cultural selectionism is a Darwinian approach to the understanding of human culture which, in constrast to sociobiology, holds that cultural evolution proceeds solely on the phenotypic level. Unlike structuralism, cultural selectionism predicts that the form taken by any culture will reflect historical processes rather than underlying, genetically induced biases of the human mind. Genetic selection, however, must be invoked to explain both the origin of the human capacity for culture and the maintenance of this genetic capacity in modern humans. Both the origin and the maintenance of the genetic capacity for culture in humans are most realistically modeled if we assume that culture is fundamentally an adaptation to the social, as opposed to the natural, environment.