The New Cultural Evolution

In my graduate seminar on evolutionary theory in the 1990s, taught by the archaeologist Bill Keegan, we all discovered together the new cultural evolution. Keegan was trained in evolutionary theory by Allen Johnson and Tim Earle at UCLA. There he also learned of the human behavioral ecology (HBE) of Winterhalder and Smith, and wrote an article for the American Anthropologist titled “The optimal foraging analysis of horticultural production (1986).” In our seminar class, we explored the HBE of Winterhalder and Smith, the evolutionary psychology (EP) of Cosmides and Tooby, and also, I believe, the dual inheritance (DI) of Boyd and Richerson. Bill became my dissertation chair. My dissertation included a section in which I adapted the traditional evolutionary anthropology of Johnson and Earle (1989) to the systems diagramming of HT Odum, another PhD committee member. When I started my professor job at Tzu Chi University in Taiwan, I wanted to know more about the approaches of the new cultural evolution, so I spent some time working through the literature and creating a graduate class, Culture and Evolution. Eventually that work led to this undergraduate class.

What joins together these newer approaches is their desire to emphasize the neo-Darwinian tradition, i.e., a focus on ‘reproductive fitness’. Its target was thus individuals and not human-nature systems. This approach is sometimes distinguished from the traditional cultural evolution with the label ‘micro’, and thus the micro-macro distinction.

If modern humans exhibit the dispositions studied by HBEs, DIs, and EPs, in this class I begin by asking the most basic questions, when did these dispositions appear/evolve in the human line, and what is their evidence in our human primate relatives? The class therefore begins with paleoanthropology. It then moves to primatology. The first half of the class is completed with introductions to EP and HBE.

The second half of the class is directly focused on ‘culture’ as a human-unique ability. Can it be studied within a neo-Darwinian tradition that treats cultural traits like genes. Cultural traits that are transmitted not by sexual reproduction, but by social learning, a second or ‘dual’ channel of inheritance, hence DI. In my expanded view, DIs study the mechanisms of transmission, the strategies (biases), the sources, the means, the mediums, and the maintenance of cultural transmission. I am responsible for the last two ‘M’s, mediums and maintenance in my hierarchy of cultural information forms (Abel 2014).

My department wanted me to call this class Psychological Anthropology, and some of my ppts will refer to that, but here I am giving it my preferred title, the New Cultural Evolution. What differentiates this class from the graduate class, Culture and Evolution? The graduate class includes a long section of ppts on the expanded evolutionary synthesis of complex self-organizing systems. Including that material here made the class too long. This class was more recently updated and improved. It embodies a more coherent narrative of the topics. It also includes my latest research into cultural transmission and the hierarchy of information cycles.