title: Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution.
abstract: Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations; (4) the "cultural fitness" of a mental representation can be inferred from its successful transmission; and (5) selective forces only matter if the sources of variation are random. We close by sketching the outlines of a unified evolutionary science of culture.
authors.affiliation: Departments of Psychology and Economics, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada. joseph.henrich@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Henrich
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA. rboyd@anthro.ucla.edu.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Boyd
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California-Davis, One Shields Ave, Davis, CA, 95616, USA.
authors.forename: Peter J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Richerson
keywords: Cultural evolution; Cultural transmission; Dual inheritance theory; Epidemiology of representations; Memes; Replicators