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Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". [1] Cultural evolution is the change of this information ...
Marshall Sahlins, co-editor with Elman Service of Evolution and Culture (1960), divided the evolution of societies into 'general' and 'specific'. [70] General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization and adaptiveness to environment. [70]
Tylor often likens primitive cultures to "children", and sees culture and the mind of humans as progressive. His work was a refutation of the theory of social degeneration, which was popular at the time. [7] At the end of Primitive Culture, Tylor writes, "The science of culture is essentially a reformers' science." [24]
Leslie Alvin White (January 19, 1900, Salida, Colorado – March 31, 1975, Lone Pine, California) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of the theories on cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. [1]
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, [1] was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution.
Transmitted cultural behaviors are those behaviors which are learned from one’s social group, regardless of environment. As such, investigating evoked culture may well rest in the domain of evolutionary psychology and transmitted culture studied by culture evolution, social psychology, and other disciplines.
Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, [1] to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism".
Cultural selection theory has so far never been a separate discipline. [2] However it has been proposed [3] that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and "the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution". [3]