From Natural Selection To Cultural Selection

Culture is always charming word and cultural problem is an absorbing frontier topic of thescholars. During the cultural convention and modernization, the comment and discussion ofcultural evolution is an absorbing subject. Cultural evolution is a deeply influential theorywhich endured frustration and dispute. Cultural evolution can be seen as a part of commonevolution. The thoughts of cultural evolution were borrowed from biological evolution.Large quantity of terms in biological evolution such as "cultural evolution," "culture,""cultural inheritance," and "cultural selection" were directly used on cultural evolution. Butuntil now the concepts themselves were not explained. Does the denotation changed afterbeing borrowed into cultural evolution?It is very important for cultural evolution. Thearticle started with the fundamental concepts of cultural evolution. Then the article explainedthe history and development of cultural evolution, social study and cultural heredity, naturalselection. The article also outlined the denotations of "cultural evolution," "culture,""cultural inheritance," and "cultural selection" in order to make the logic of culture evolutionclear.This dissertation is made up of five parts:I．At first, research reviewed the literature on culture of relative discipline and defined thedenotation of culture in this research: Culture consists of shared, learned, ideational propertiesof individuals. These ideational properties include information, knowledge, beliefs, values,preferences, and the like, which I will collectively refer to as ideas. Behavior, materialartifacts, and social organization are not themselves elements of culture, but culture may beexpressed in the form of behavior, material artifacts, and modes of social organization.Behavior, material artifacts, and social organization may, in turn, influence the course ofcultural evolution.Secondly, research conclude that a theory of cultural evolution is a type-level, causal theoryof cultural change by stating what a theory of cultural evolution is, describing the Darwinianapproach to cultural evolution, and characterizing potential alternatives to Darwinian theoriesof cultural evolution. Historically, there have been two broad approaches to such theory: theSpencerian approach (which emphasizes stages of development and directional laws), and the Darwinian approach (which emphasizes causal processes and Darwinian evolution). Whilethese approaches emphasize different concepts and represent different disciplinary lineages, itturns out that they are not mutually exclusive. Spencerian theories can incorporate Darwiniancausal processes, and Darwinian theories can obey Spencerian directional laws.II．In this part, dissertation debated cultural transmission at the aspact of social learning andinheritance. As we pointed, culture is shared, learned, ideational properties of individuals.Then, how culture is shared? In general people accept that culture is learned. Culturaltransmission processes are probably not just social learning processes, nor some subset ofthem. The most plausible conclusion is that the sharing and acquisition of culture involveshybrid learning as well. Whether we adopt a context definition or a cognitive definition ofsocial learning, we are forced to recognize that most human learning is simply a hybrid of thetwo. The most general concept of cultural inheritance, and the one most relevant tounderstanding cultural evolution, is the developmental concept. The main mechanisms ofcultural inheritance are social learning and individual learning in a common environment(ILCE). Not all systems of cultural inheritance are amenable to variational evolution. Thecultural evolutionary dynamics of some populations might be better explained bytransformational rather than variational processes.III．Cultural selection is conceived as an analogy to natural selection, but is far less studiedand understood. Thus, this part discuss what natural selection is and how it is involved inevolutionary explanations. A selection pressure is a specific causal factor that has adifferential effect on the rates of survival and/or reproduction of the different types in apopulation. The total effect of selection on a population results from the net influence of allthe different (and potentially opposing) selection pressures acting on the population. Thefitness of a given type is just the net quantitative influence of all selection pressures on itsaverage rate of survival and reproduction. Selection can take place in a population even whenthere are no net differences in the fitnesses of the different types—it's just that thecountervailing selection pressures will cancel each other out—but selection will only lead topopulation change when there are fitness differences between types.Natural selection is not always the most important cause of evolutionary change; the causesof fitness differences are often obscure and difficult to identify; heritability for many traits islow; developmental constraints on the space of possible phenotypes are pervasive; variationsare frequently discontinuous; and there are numerous biases in the generation of newbiological variants. These facts are not worrisome or problematic. They imply simply thatthere are numerous cases where natural selection does limited work in explainingevolutionary outcomes and other evolutionary forces do more.Ⅳ. In this part research fleshed out a general and inclusive concept of cultural selection that has two key characteristics. First, cultural selection, even cumulative cultural selection,can take place under a wide range of assumptions about cultural inheritance. We need notassume that culture replicates, or even that culture is transmitted from one individual toanother. We need only assume, at a minimum, that some process or other allows culturalproperties to be reliably regenerated over time across individuals or groups. Second, culturalselection can come about in a variety of ways. Research discussed cultural selection pressuresat several different stages of the life cycle of a cultural property, including exposure, learning,endorsement, and retention. Many further elaborations or modifications to this account arepossible. Indeed, no single account of cultural life cycles or cultural selection pressures willbe appropriate for all cases.Cultural selection is an extremely general process. The conditions for its occurrence are notdifficult to satisfy: a population must have variation in cultural properties, and this variationmust cause certain properties to be exposed to more individuals, learned by more individuals,endorsed by more individuals, or retained for longer, than other properties. So described,cultural selection on human culture not only occurs, but is probably a widespreadphenomenon.Ⅴ. In this section research demonstrated that cultural selection can help answer distributionquestions and origin question within the domain of culture. Then it show how an analogousset of six considerations can be used to assess the explanatory work that cultural selectiondoes in different cases. This section have provided a framework for assessing the work thatcultural selection does in explaining particular episodes of cultural change. The frameworkshows that even when cultural selection occurs widely in a population, many factors canmitigate the explanatory significance of cultural selection. Nonetheless, a few broad, tentativeconclusions about the explanatory significance of cultural selection have emerged. First,cultural selection often fails to be an illuminating explanation for within-population culturalchange. Second, the ideal conditions for cultural selection explanation are, in general, betterapproximated between populations than within them. Cultural selection is important undersome limited circumstances, but it is just one of many factors that help to explain culturalchange.