Cultural evolution

Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change.

Historically, there have been a number of different approaches to the study of cultural evolution, including dual inheritance theory, sociocultural evolution, memetics, cultural evolutionism and other variants on Cultural selection theory. These approaches differ not just in the history of their development and discipline of origin, but in how they conceptualise the process of cultural evolution and the assumptions, theories and methods they apply to its study. In recent years there has been a movement convergence of this cluster of related theories, towards seeing cultural evolution as a unified discipline in its own right.

Aristotle thought that development of cultural form (e.g. poetry) stops, when it reaches its maturity. In 1873 in Harper's New Monthly Magazine it was written, that: "By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage over indirect, words of precise mening the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everwhere in disadvantage".

Cultural evolution, in the Darwinian sense of variation and selective inheritance, could be said to trace back to Darwin himself. He argued for both customs (1874 p239) and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language.

Darwin’s ideas, along with those of such as Comte and Quetelet, influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hodgson and Knudsen single out David George Ritchie and Thorstein Veblen, crediting the former with anticipating both dual inheritance theory and universal Darwinism. Contra the stereotypical image of social Darwinism that developed later in the century neither Ritchie nor Veblen were on the political right.

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