Cultural adaptations - Is it conceptually coherent to apply natural selection to cultural evolution?

GINNOBILI, SANTIAGO

Darwin´s Legacy: The Status of Evolutionary Archaeology in Argentina

British Archaeological Reports

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2016; p. 1 - 11

Critics of Darwinian approaches to the study of the evolution of human and social behavior often express their dissent claiming that cultural evolution is Lamarckian. By this they mean two things. First, that contrary to natural selection, in Lamarckian mechanisms of use and disuse plus the inheritance of acquired traits, the modifications in an organism arise as a solution to the environmental problem at hand, i.e., variation is not blind; and second, that the acquired trait is transmitted to the offspring by imitation or learning. In this paper I will reconstruct informally the theory of natural selection as it was used by Darwin in order to show that the fact that cultural evolution has these Lamarckian features does not imply that it cannot evolve by natural selection. The appeal to Darwin´s original writings has two advantages. On the one hand, the way he applies the theory makes it more transparent than in contemporary applications which are its fundamental concepts and structure. On the other, Darwin holds that Lamarckian mechanisms can be causally responsible for variations on which natural selection operates, thus showing that it is possible to hold a theory of natural selection that is not incompatible with these alleged Lamarckian features of cultural evolution.