Culture and the Evolutionary Process

Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process. University of Chicago Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1985

Link

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5970597.html

Cited from

biology_ecology, computer_science, economics_finance

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Adaptation
  • Adaptation optimizes the system for the criterion that selects, not necessarily the underlying goal.

    This sourceFormal models of cultural transmission (prestige bias, conformity bias) showing how adaptation to proxy criteria can drift away from biological fitness — the cultural analogue of Goodhart's collapse.

• Evolutionarily Stable Strategy
  • Cybersecurity and institutional design — the stable mix of honest and adversarial nodes in arms-race equilibria. Cultural evolution — the stability of moral norms, religious practices, and parenting strategies under cultural transmission.

    This sourceApplies evolutionary/population-genetic modeling to cultural transmission, including frequency-dependent bias and the stability of cooperative norms under social learning.

• Greedy Algorithm
  • Natural selection is structurally greedy on fitness, and populations stay stuck on local peaks until drift, mutation, or environmental change supplies the randomisation a greedy process needs to escape — the same fact appearing in the cultural evolution of norms.

    This sourceApplies population-genetic models to cultural evolution (selection, biased transmission, guided variation), showing norm/cultural evolution proceeds by local-best selection that can settle on local optima until variation (innovation, drift) supplies escape — structural greed in a cultural substrate.

• Inheritance
  • In biology it is Mendelian and polygenic inheritance, cytoplasmic and epigenetic inheritance, cultural inheritance, and dual-inheritance theory.

    This sourceFoundational treatment of cultural inheritance and dual-inheritance (gene-culture coevolution) theory.

• Natural Selection
  • In cultural and social systems, memetic and cultural evolution applies the engine to practices, beliefs, technologies, and norms: variants arise, are differentially adopted and transmitted (the selection pressure being whatever makes some spread faster), and successful variants are retained and copied, so a culture's repertoire adapts over time.

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