Ted Cloak is a pioneer in the field. He published "Cultural Microevolution" in 1966, "Is a cultural ethology possible?" in 1968 and "Cultural Darwinism: Natural Selection of the Spoked Wood Wheel" in 1968.His bio. says that he got a degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin in 1966. He was among the researchers cited by Dawkins (1976). He has continued pursuing the evolution of culture over the decades since then.
This quote from the 1975 version of "Is a cultural ethology possible?" illustrates what probably inspired Dawkins:
In a human carrier, then, a cultural instruction is more analogous to a viral or bacterial gene than to a gene of the carrier's own genome. It is like an active parasite that controls some behavior of its host. It may be in complete mutual symbiosis with the human host, in which case the behavior it produces has survival value for itself through the value it has for the survival/reproduction of the host. On the other hand, it may be like the gene of a flu or "cold" virus; when the virus makes the host behave, e.g., sneeze, that behavior results in extraorganismic self-replication of the virus gene but not in survival or reproduction of the host or his conspecific. From the organism's point of view, the best that can always be said for cultural instructions, as for parasites of any sort, is that they can't destroy their hosts more quickly than they can propagate. In short, "our" cultural instructions don't work for us organisms; we work for them. At best, we are in symbiosis with them, as we are with our genes. At worst, we are their slavesSee Ted Cloak's home page for downloadable versions of many of his papers and further resources: http://www.tedcloak.com/
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There is no accepted theory of culture connecting and unifying the social sciences, arts & humanities. 10+ schools of thought, cultural ethology and memetics being two failed attempts to Darwinise culture.
ReplyDeleteThere will be a scientific theory of the social but it won't be an evolutionary theory. Anyone asserting otherwise, I simply ask, "Where is the evidence?"
As far as I know that is a dead position. Almost everyone agrees that culture evolves - the issues are mostly over how. You ask for evidence, but your disagreement probably does not concerned with evidence, else it would be over by now. More likely your disagreement is over the meanings of terms. So, for instance, proponents claim that culture evolves according to the definitions of evolution in most textbooks. Those typically refer to "heritable traits". They do not specify how the inheritance takes place - it could be via nucleic acids, cultural transmission or any other means of transmitting information down the generations. Not all textbooks agree, however. For example one by Mark Ridley explicitly excludes cultural change, giving the following (daft) rationale:
Delete"Changes that take place in human politics, economics, history, technology and even scientific theories are sometimes loosely described as evolutionary. In this sense "evolutionary" means mainly that there has been change over time - and perhaps not in a preordained direction. [...] human ideas and institutions can sometimes spit during their history - but their history does not have such a clear-cut branching tree-like structure as does the history of life. Change and splitting provide two of the main themes in evolutionary theory."
So: it could be that you are using a definition like the one Mark Ridley proposes, and that might be why you disagree with proponents.