Cultural selection vs. cultural attraction: What’s the debate?
Marieke Woensdregt (Edinburgh)
Tuesday 13 December 2016, 11:00–12:30
1.17 Dugald Stewart Building
The idea of this session is to have a bit of a mix between a talk and a paper discussion. You won’t be required to read any paper though!
The talk part will consist of me summarising a debate about the similarities and differences between a so-called ‘Darwinian’ approach to cultural evolution (work by e.g. Boyd, Richerson and Henrich) and a ‘cultural attraction’ approach (work by e.g. Sperber and Claidière). The Darwinian approach to cultural evolution is often characterised as locating the driving force of cultural change in selection among variants that are transmitted fairly faithfully from generation to generation. The cultural attraction approach on the other hand focuses on how the process of transmission itself can drive cultural change: by closely replicating certain variants while transforming others. Where the first approach relies on rather faithful ‘copying’ or imitation of variants, the second assumes reconstruction of variants each time they are transmitted.
I will discuss some of the theoretical views on whether this difference in approach is based on a real disagreement about how cultural evolution works, or whether it can be characterised as simply a difference in granularity, object of study or definition. After setting out this debate, including the attempts that have been made to reconcile the two approaches, we will move into our own discussion – focusing on how all this relates to our own work -, for which I’ll provide some discussion points.
If you do want to read up a little before coming, I’d advise this paper by Acerbi & Mesoudi (mainly the first 8 pages):
Acerbi, A., & Mesoudi, A. (2015). If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution. Biology and Philosophy, 30, 481–503. doi:10.1007/s10539-015-9490-2