If we are all cultural Darwinians what's the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution
If we are all cultural Darwinians what's the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution
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DOI：
10.1007/s10539-015-9490-2
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发表时间：
2015-07-01
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Mesoudi, Alex
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Acerbi, Alberto;Mesoudi, Alex
文化进化研究的特点是，文化按照广义的达尔文原则进化。然而，文化进化和基因进化之间的类比应该推进到什么程度还有待商榷。在这里，我们考察了最近的一个分歧，它涉及到文化传播在多大程度上应该被视为一种允许在不同变体之间进行选择的防腐机制，或者是一种变革性的过程，在这种过程中，个体每次被传播时都会重新创造变体。后者与“文化吸引力”的概念联系在一起。这个问题引起了很多误解和困惑。我们首先澄清了各自的立场，指出除了侧重点不同外，文化吸引和标准文化演变方法之间实际上没有实质性的不相容。文化传播应该被认为是一种保存过程还是重建过程最终是一个经验问题，我们考察了在最近的文化进化实验研究中，保存文化传播和重建文化传播是如何被研究的。最后，我们讨论了防腐和重建过程的相对重要性如何取决于分析的粒度和正在研究的领域。
Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of "cultural attraction". This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied.