Russell Gray: University of Auckland Department of Psychology

Current debates about “Darwinizing culture” have typically focused on the validity of memetics. In this talk I will argue that meme-like inheritance is not a necessary requirement for descent with modification and suggest that an alternative, and more productive, way of Darwinizing culture can be found in the application of computational phylogenetic methods. The benefits of this approach will be illustrated by drawing on my recent work examining linguistic and cultural evolution in the Pacific. I will discuss problems that reticulate evolution allegedly cause phylogenetic analyses and suggest ways in which these problems can be overcome. Throughout I will emphasize that most debates about cultural phylogenies can only be settled by empirical research rather than armchair speculation.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/R.Gray1.pdf