Canoes and cultural evolution

摘要

Over the last 30 years, the idea that the processes producing cultural stability and change are analogous in important respects to those of biological evolution has become increasingly popular. Biological evolution is characterized by changing frequencies of genes in populations through time as a result of such processes as natural selection; likewise, cultural evolution refers to the changing distributions of cultural attributes in populations, which are affected by processes such as natural selection but also by others that have no analogue in genetic evolution.