Cultural Evolution

Cultural evolution refers to the processes by which cultural traits, practices, technologies, and institutions change, accumulate, and are transmitted over time, sometimes explained by analogies with biological evolution. Nineteenth-century thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Edward Tylor proposed unilinear schemes in which societies progress through stages from savagery to civilization, an approach later discredited for ethnocentrism and racism. Twentieth-century neo-evolutionists, including Leslie White, who linked evolution to energy capture, Julian Steward, who developed multilinear evolution, and Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service, offered more empirical accounts tied to ecology and technology. Gerhard Lenski’s ecological-evolutionary theory related social development to subsistence technology. Contemporary approaches treat culture as a system of inherited information. Richard Dawkins proposed memes as cultural replicators, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman modeled cultural transmission, and Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Joseph Henrich developed dual inheritance theory and emphasized cumulative cultural learning. Critics argue that cultural change involves intention, power, and meaning in ways that biological analogies miss. Cultural evolution remains central to research on social change, cooperation, technology, and human development.