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According to Ernst Mayr, professor of zoology at Harvard University, Darwin's most distinct contributions to evolutionary biology and ecology are as follows: "The first is the non-constancy of species, or the modern conception of evolution itself. The second is the notion of branching evolution, implying the common descent of all species of ...
A developmental model of the evolution of the mind, culture, and society was the result, paralleling the evolution of the human species: [23] "Modern savages [sic] became, in effect, living fossils left behind by the march of progress, relics of the Paleolithic still lingering on into the present."
Memetics models cultural change after population genetics, taking cultural units to be analogous to genes. [1] A good example of this theory is found by looking to the reason large businesses tend to grow larger. The answer includes the benefits of mass production and distribution, international advertising, and more funds for product development.
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 ...
The theory of evolution by natural selection has also been adopted as a foundation for various ethical and social systems, such as social Darwinism, an idea that preceded the publication of The Origin of Species, popular in the 19th century, which holds that "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined in 1851 by Herbert Spencer, [1] 8 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution ...
Human evolution (origins of society and culture) – Transition of human species to anthropologically modern behavior; Inversion (evolutionary biology) – Hypothesis in developmental biology; Mosaic evolution – Evolution of characters at various rates both within and between species
Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, two strong proponents of cultural evolution, postulate that the act of social learning, or learning in a group as done in group selection, allows human populations to accrue information over many generations. [51] This leads to cultural evolution of behaviors and technology alongside genetic evolution.
Neoevolutionism as a social theory attempts to explain the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution while discarding some dogmas of the previous theories of social evolutionism.