When can cultural selection explain adaptation?

Abstract

Cultural selection models aim to explain cultural phenomena as the products of a selective process, often characterising institutions, practices, norms or behaviours as adaptations. I argue that a lack of attention has been paid to the explanatory power of cultural selection frameworks. Arguments for cultural selection frequently depend on demonstrating only that selection models can in principle be applied to culture, rather than explicitly demonstrating the explanatory payoffs that could arise from their application. Understanding when and how cultural selection generates powerful explanations is crucial to evaluating cultural selection, as well as realising its promised epistemic and practical benefits. I argue that the ability for cultural selection to explain ‘design without a designer’ is crucial to successful and powerful cultural selection explanations. I introduce the strategy of comparing cultural selection to goal-directed agent accounts in order to evaluate when cultural selection can provide distinctive explanatory payoffs, drawing on two case studies to illustrate the benefits of this strategy. I argue that a focus on phenomena which cannot be explained through intention or agency-based explanations in particular could provide a fruitful avenue to identifying the cases where cultural selection can be insightfully applied.

Agency, goal-orientation and evolutionary explanations

“…If organisms' goal-oriented engagement with their affordances is what enables adaptive evolution, would not citing those stable endpointsor goalsalso explain why evolution proceeded in one direction rather than in another (Walsh 2015;Jaeger 2021;Sultan et al 2021) xviii ? This is, perhaps, not so different from legitimate teleological explanations for adaptive cultural change in humans, a kind of explanation that can be preferred over cultural selection explanations (Chellappoo 2022). Jaeger goes as far as concluding that naturalistic teleological explanation is a necessary part of any agential theory of evolution, because of the immanence of rules which are generated by the agents themselves.…”

Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges

“…The use of CET in sustainability science represents little more than proof of concept for the potential value of applying results in CES, and it is important not to dress old solutions up in the clothes of new theories (Chellappoo, 2022b ). However, the case also illustrates a broader strategy of focusing theoretically perspicacious CES research upon norm-based social ills.…”

Higher level constructive neutral evolution

“…The purpose of this section is not to bolster any theory of cultural evolution. The explanatory utility of cultural adaptations is questionable, and cultural evolution is a topic that provokes reasonable scepticism from both evolutionists and cultural theorists alike (Chellappoo 2022;Lewens 2015;Godfrey-Smith 2012;Fracchia and Lewontin 2005;Wilkins and Bourrat 2001). It is enough for my purposes that there are historical processes that lead to complexity in human affairs and that these historical processes sometimes lead to complex dependency relationships without apparent advantage.…”