Richerson and Boyd: Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force | NYT
In the NYT article "Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force," Nicholas Wade reports on the research of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, authors of Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.
From the article by Wade:
As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.
The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology. ...
With archaic humans, culture changed very slowly. ... But among behaviorally modern humans, those of the last 50,000 years, the tempo of cultural change has been far brisker. This raises the possibility that human evolution has been accelerating in the recent past under the impact of rapid shifts in culture.
From "The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values (pdf)" by Richerson and Boyd, a chapter in the book Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, edited by Paul Zak.
The key to understanding cultural evolution is the idea that it is a population level phenomenon. That is, values are the individual level motor of social institutions, but we cannot understand the evolution of institutions only in terms of the individual level processes.
To put it another way, even if we have perfect information about the innate aspects of human behavior, we can only go part way towards understanding values and institutions. Cultural history matters over medium time scales, and genetic history over somewhat longer time scales. ...
We will argue that the social instincts that we inherit from our tribal past were shaped by gene-culture coevolution in which group selection on cultural variation played the leading role. ...The macroevolutionary puzzle is thus why, given the current adaptive success of free enterprise societies and the fact that humans were apparently completely capable 50,000 years ago, did cultural evolution proceed so slowly over the past 50 millennia?
We are still near the beginning of this explanatory endeavor but we know roughly what dots we need to connect and have the means to draw some interesting hypothetical dashed lines between them.Douglass North (1994) remarked not so long ago that neoclassical economic theory needs to be supplemented by theory that has a richer appreciation of individual psychology and cumulative learning of societies in order to understand the history of economies. Cultural evolutionary theory is a key element of this enlarged theory (Bowles 2003).
