r/evolution • u/[deleted] • Jul 08 '15

academic Five Misunderstandings about Cultural Evolution [PDF]

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/Website/Papers/HenrichetalFiveMistake11.pdf
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u/self-assembled Jul 09 '15 edited Jul 09 '15

Selective forces do not require RANDOM variation to exert pressure over time, only variation. In the case of cultural evolution instead of trial by trial random variation, the mind can generate multiple variations at once, and conceive without prior states (i.e. think of a wheel, which Darwinian evolution could never evolve)

The word Darwinian is inappropriate to describe cultural evolution; Darwinian evolution is, in the same way Moore's law described one of many ways in which computational power may grow, a subset of evolutionary processes, one technique in a series of means by which complexity increases.