title: If we are all cultural Darwinians what's the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.
abstract: Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of "cultural attraction". This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied.
authors.affiliation: Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UU UK ; Philosophy & Ethics, School of Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, Den Dolech 2, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Acerbi
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Dawson Building, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE UK ; Human Biological and Cultural Evolution Group, Department of Biosciences, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9FE UK.
authors.forename: Alex
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mesoudi
keywords: Cultural attraction; Cultural attractors; Cultural evolution; Cultural transmission