Being Concrete About Culture and Cultural Evolution

Abstract

Culture consists of behavior. The units are practices shared by members of a group and acquired as a result of membership in the group. Although it is common to define the units of culture as abstractions, such as culturgens or memes, these abstractions in no way help to explain a group’s practices. Instead, they only direct research away from the context and consequences that result in transmission of a practice from one group member to another. If culture is to be described as an evolutionary process, one must have a sufficiently general definition of “evolutionary process” to allow genetic evolution and cultural evolution to be examples. This may be accomplished by defining an evolutionary process as composed of variation (within a pool of replicators), transmission (by copying), and selection (by differential transmission). The replicators of cultural evolution are practices, which are units of operant behavior (i.e., behavior under control of consequences and context). Practices are transmitted from individual to individual by imitation and instruction. Instruction may be understood with the concept of a rule, which is a verbal discriminative stimulus (i.e., a verbally created context). Instruction consists of rule-giving, which results in rule-following on the part of the instructee. New rules come into a culture frequently as a result of rule-making, the generation of new rules on the basis of non-social stimuli. Selection in cultural evolution occurs because imitation and instruction of competing practices have differential consequences in the long run, consequences that impact reproductive potential. Since such long-term consequences have little effect on behavior, an adaptive practice (i.e., one that pays in the long run, called “self-control”) is strengthened in the short-term by social reinforcers delivered by rule-givers. A behavioral analysis focuses on environmental events that are observable and, so, susceptible to research. The postulating of fictitious inner entities, whether they be memes, “devices,” or “modules,” only impedes understanding of culture and cultural evolution. Natural selection, because it is short-sighted and opportunistic, may be expected to produce mechanisms that aid and abet valuable behavioral functions. The key to understanding cultural evolution lies in understanding practices in the light of their environmental contexts and short- and long-term consequences.