Cultural evolution

Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as the "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time. This theoretical framework uses concepts like cultural variants, transmission mechanisms, and selective pressures to model how ideas, behaviors, and technologies spread and change over time, enabling rapid adaptation beyond purely genetic means.

Anthropologists originally developed the idea of cultural evolution, historically also known as sociocultural evolution, in the 19th century, stemming from Charles Darwin's research on evolution. Today, cultural evolution has become the basis for a growing field of scientific research in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, psychology, and organizational studies. Previously, theorists believed that social change resulted from biological adaptations. However, anthropologists now commonly accept that social changes arise from a combination of social, environmental, and biological influences, as viewed from a nature vs nurture framework.

Henrich credits cultural evolution with vast and sweeping influence:

For over a million years, the products of cumulative cultural evolution — our complex technologies, languages, and institutions — have driven our genetic evolution, shaping not only our digestive systems, teeth, feet, and shoulders but also our brains and psychology.

There have been a number of different approaches to the study of cultural evolution, including dual inheritance theory, sociocultural evolution, memetics, and other variants on cultural selection theory. The approaches differ not just in the history of their development and discipline of origin but in how they conceptualize the process of cultural evolution and the assumptions, theories, and methods that they apply to its study. There has been a convergence of the cluster of related theories towards seeing cultural evolution as a unified discipline in its own right.