© 1986 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Cultural Evolution1
Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine Stanford, California 94305
SYNOPSIS. Culture is made possible by the existence of mechanisms of learning and communication. Because of it, we can profit from the experience and ideas of others. It is convenient to include in it tools, technologies, and all culturally transmitted behaviors. At least from an evolutionary point of view, they share common mechanisms. It is also becoming increasingly clearthat animals share with us potential for cultural adaptation, which is however much more highlydeveloped in humans, as shown for instance, by the extension of human brain areas that are involved in control of hand and phonation organs.
To understand how culture evolves one can make resort to models that map reasonably well after the necessary substitutions, into those that havebeen useful in biology. A major difference that one finds is in mechanisms of transmission, which are much more varied in culture than in biology. Parent-child (vertical) transmission is present in both. An "infectious" (horizontal) mechanism is characteristic of cultural transmission, but is practically absent in the genetic case. Other mechanisms of transmission are reviewed, along with their evolutionary consequences. The variety of these mechanisms can make culture extremely fast and flexible, and there are the great advantages of cultural adaptation vs. genetic adaptation by natural selection, or vs. physiological adaptations (which are relatively fast but highly specific: for instance, tanning under exposure to UV). But culture can also be extremely conservative. Also, some cultural transmission mechanisms allow heterogeneitybetween individuals to persist, others tend to make populations extremely homogeneous.
The study of culture from an evolutionary point of view is young, but very promising.