Alex Mesoudi: University of British Columbia W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied EthicsA Darwinian theory of cultural evolution holds that the same fundamental principles that govern biological change – variation, selection and inheritance – also underlie human cultural change. In fact, the empirical case for cultural evolution is now as strong as the case that Charles Darwin presented in The Origin of Species for biological evolution (Mesoudi, Whiten & Laland, 2004). Consequently, similar tools, methods and theories that biologists use to study biological evolution can be adapted to study cultural change, and the structure of the science of biological evolution – evolutionary biology – can serve as a model for the structure of a science of cultural evolution (Mesoudi, Whiten & Laland, 2006).
One branch of this science of cultural evolution is the experimental study of cultural transmission, which uses the methods of social psychology to identify systematic biases that affect the transmission of information through groups of people. For example, Mesoudi, Whiten and Dunbar (2006) found that information regarding social relationships is transmitted with greater fidelity than equivalent non-social information, consistent with “Machiavellian intelligence†hypotheses of primate brain evolution. Mesoudi and O’Brien (submitted), meanwhile, simulated the cultural transmission of arrowhead designs, matching different transmission biases to actual patterns of prehistoric arrowhead variation in the archaeological record. This integration of individual-level transmission biases and population-level archaeological patterns is facilitated by an evolutionary approach to human culture.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Mesoudi_2.5.07.pdf