The Evolution of Merged Culture, Genes, and Computing Artefacts

This chapter examines the evolution of cultural entities and how it is influenced by an environment that includes genes and computing devices. More specifically, it discusses the co-evolution of culture with the environment comprising genes and computing artefacts. It first considers some general properties of this co-evolution, including timing and sequence, and how cultural information is gradually modified as it is transmitted from one generation to the next. It then looks at genetic information and its interaction with environments, as well as its storage in computers. Finally, it explores how genetic information merges with cultural information and artefactual information.

Idiosyncratic Production Regimes: Co-evolution of Economic and Legal Institutions in the Varieties of Capitalism

This chapter examines production regimes and their idiosyncracies, with particular reference to the co-evolution of economic and legal institutions in the varieties of capitalism. It first considers two theories that explain the institutional varieties of capitalism, namely, the theory of production regimes and the theory of institutional co-selection. It then looks at the theory of self-organising social systems as well as its critique of the theories of production regimes and co-selection. It also discusses the theory of autopoietic social systems and its emphasis on self-organisation and self-reproduction, together with the multi-polarity and cyclicity of production regimes. The chapter concludes by outlining the main assumptions of autopoiesis theory, focusing on just-in-time contracts in the United States and Germany.

Learning from Culture

This chapter examines some of the lessons that can be learned by social scientists from a naturalised science of culture. After considering whether culture is unique to humans, it discusses different kinds of cultural entities such as artefacts and how we should think about them. It then explores whether culture must be understood in terms of processes or mechanisms and evaluates the relative importance of individual development and evolution. Finally, it explores whether culture and cultural entities may be considered adaptations.

Between Evolution and History: Biology, Culture, and the Myth of Human Origins

This chapter explains how the phenomena of both organic evolution and cultural change can be accommodated within a single explanatory paradigm. It first argues that a model of variation under selection cannot fully grasp the generative dynamics of cultural change, and instead calls for an emphasis on the activities that give rise to artefacts, rather than on the final forms of such artefacts. It then discusses history as but one aspect of a total process of evolution that embraces the entire organic world; how biological organisms and cultural artefacts condition the development of other entities or beings to which they relate; and genotypes and phenotypes in relation to natural selection. It also describes the genealogical model in comparison with the relational model, with particular reference to their application to understanding the kinship of both human and nonhuman beings, and how the relational model can be applied not only to persons but also to the development and evolution of organisms. The chapter concludes by discussing the life-histories of artefacts in terms of replication and reproduction.

The Evolution of Education: Change and Reform

This chapter focuses on education and the courses it considers cultural entities. Using three different evolutionary analogies, it explains how education can emerge, evolve or change in response to external factors. The emphasis is on the emergence of Science, Technology and Society (STS) courses in tertiary and secondary education in Britain. The discussion begins by focusing on education as a cultural artefact and how educational change is influenced by culture. The chapter then examines the phases of deevelopment of the STS curriculum in British education and the application of evolutionary thinking to the major trends in educational reform that have affected Britain and other countries during the last century, citing some of the later writings by Donald Campbell. It also highlights the imporance of identifying both the organisms whose evolution was being tampered with, and the ‘habitat’ in which they had to exist, in order to understand the extreme and damaging educational changes of the 1990s in Britain. Finally, it considers trends in STS education in the post-Thatcher era.

The Evolution of Technological Knowledge: Reflections on Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process

This chapter analyses Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, a book that explores the analogy between technical innovation and biological evolution, and whether such an analogy could be developed from a ‘metaphor’ into a ‘model’. After discussing the explanatory power of ‘evolutionary reasoning’, the chapter describes an alternative approach to the analysis of technological innovation. It then presents an evolutionary argument for the growth of knowledge and explains how it differs from neo-Darwinism, and examines rational choice theory in relation to natural selection. It also looks at six elements of Adam Smith's psychological theory of the emergence and development of science: the motivation for generating new ideas; the generation of novelty and the ex-ante selection processes which guide its adoption or rejection; the role of aesthetic criteria both in guiding conjectures and in encouraging their acceptance; Smith's argument that connecting principles which seem to work well are widely diffused; the renewal of the evolutionary process; and the evolution of the evolutionary process itself. Finally, the chapter considers the implications of uncertainty for cognition and the growth of knowledge.

Between Development and Evolution: How to Model Cultural Change

This chapter explores how the Darwinian model of evolution emerged as a major organising concept for explaining cultural change. It considers the application of the general framework of selection theory for thinking about cultural change and the evolution of other aspects of the world, but argues that the genic, neo-Darwinian model is inadequate for understanding cultural evolution. The chapter first discusses some of the properties of the genetic system and highlights the problems it poses for modelling cultural change, as well as some of the properties of the other inheritance systems known today (the epigenetic, the behavioural and the symbolic). It then suggests how changing the major assumptions of the classical genetic model gives rise to a view that denies a categorical distinction between evolution and development. It also argues that the classic neo-Darwinian assumptions about heredity and evolution must be abandoned in favour of more ‘Lamarckian’ genetic models that assign a central role to targeted genetic variation and somatic selection. Finally, it describes epigenetic inheritance systems, along with the transmission and selection of behavioural variants.

Heritable Variation and Competitive Selection as the Mechanism of Sociocultural Evolution

This chapter examines how heritable variation and competitive selection promote sociocultural evolution, based on the application of Charles Darwin's ‘descent with modification’ to human behaviour. It first considers the extent to which sociocultural selection can be reduced to natural selection before explaining how cultural and natural selection, despite being different evolutionary forces, act simultaneously on human populations and their social behaviour. It then cites the practice of venality in France between 1467 and 1789 as a clear case of replication through social rather than cultural selection.

Evolutionary Theorising in Economics

This chapter deals with evolutionary theorising in economics, first by considering two quite different ways in which evolutionary arguments have entered economic discourse. In particular, it discusses the link between economic dynamics and evolutionary theory in biology, citing the views espoused by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations. It then examines the argument put forward by a number of economists that modern neoclassical economics and evolutionary theory in biology are basically the same thing. It also outlines the similarities and differences between several contemporary strands of evolutionary economic theorising. The chapter proposes an alternative kind of economic evolutionary theorising and how it fits with other bodies of evolutionary thought in the social sciences, and especially in terms of evolutionary epistemology. Finally, it outlines the way scholars outside of economics are embracing evolutionary economics by developing evolutionary theories of processes of economic, social, and cultural change in their own fields.

Culture

This chapter explores three broad ideas of culture that recur in Western thinking in the twentieth century: French, German and English; or alternatively, the Enlightenment, the Romantic, and the Classical conceptions. The French tradition represented civilisation as a progressive, cumulative human achievement; the German tradition contrasted culture to civilisation and associated I with spiritual rather than material values; the English tradition argued that the technology and materialism of modern civilisation resulted in a spiritual crisis. The chapter looks at how ideas about the nature of culture sparked political debates that became particularly intense at times of great political upheaval. It also cites the ‘culture wars’ in America during the 1990s and how ‘cultural politics’ have dominated American public discourse. Finally, it discusses a radically different approach to culture by focusing on immigrants, along with its implications for the future of anthropology.