Cultural evolution: A general appraisal
Resumen
The first objective of the paper is to propose a classification and characterize the major approaches to the modes of cultural evolution: (1) Research programs on the origins of the cultural capacity of the human species. (2) Description and explanation of cultural change with the help of concepts or models inspired by the schemes of population genetics. (3) Research on parallel evolution of genes and culture. (4) Narrow coupling between biological evolution and cultural evolution, or the “gene-culture coevolution paradigm.” These four modes of cultural evolution make sense at a different time-scale (respectively: more than 100 000 years; less than 100 years; greater than 1000 years; less than 1000 years). The second section of the paper provides an evaluation of the various programs, from various points of view: methodological, ethical, and epistemological.
Key words: Evolution, culture, cultural evolution, population biology, geneculture coevolution, race, naturalism.
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Daniel Sperber, « Culture et modularité », in Jean-Pierre Changeux, Gènes et culture, Paris Odile Jacob, 2003, 277-299.
Luca Cavalli-Sforza M. W. Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press, Monographs in Population Biology n. 16, 1981.
The most exemplary work in this field was R. Nelson and S. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge (MA), The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982. For a comparison of evolutionary economics with the evolutionary theory of cultural change, see J. Gayon, « Sélection naturelle biologique et sélection naturelle économique : examen d’une analogie », Économies et Sociétés, n° Hors Série, Janvier 1999.
An excellent synthesis can be found in Daniel Sperber, La contagion des idées, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1996.
D. Hull, Science as a Process. An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1988.
L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, A. Piazza, P. Menozzi, J.L. Mountain, “Reconstructionof human evolution: bringing together genetic, archaeological and linguistic data,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 85 (1988): 8002-8006.
See for instance L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Gènes, peuples et langues, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1996; L Luca Cavalli-Sforza, P. Menozzi, A. Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996.
Edward. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1975.
Edward. O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978.
Edward. O. Wilson and Charles J. Lumsden, Genes, Mind and Culture, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1981.
Ibid., Chap. 1.
Ibid., p. 1.
See for instance William H. Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity, Stanford (California), Stanford University Press, 1991.
Marcus W. Feldman and L. Luca-Sforza, “Cultural and biological evolution-ary processes, selection for a trait under complex transmission,” Theoretical Population Biology 9 (1976): 238-259.
« Depuis une dizaine d’années seulement, nous commençons à comprendreque nous discutions du rapport entre évolution organique et évolution culturelle dans des termes qu’Auguste Comte eût appelés métaphysiques » (Claude Lévi-Strauss, « Race et culture » [conférence prononcée à l’UNESCO en 1971], reproduit dans Le regard éloigné, Paris, Plon, 1983).
« [Il convient de developer une] collaboration positive entre généticiens et ethnologues, pour rechercher ensemble, comment, et de quelle façon les cartes de distribution des phénomènes biologiques et des phénomènes culturels s’éclairent mutuellement » (Ibid.).
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, New York and London, Norton, 1997.
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