While most anthropologists are not naturalistic in their approach and are not even trying to
be, the project of a natural science of society and culture has always haunted the field …

The idea that cultural evolution exhibits variation, competition, and inheritance and therefore
can be studied by adjusting the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is an …

Models of cultural evolution have often been the result of two mutually reinforcing lines of
thought. On the one hand there was the nineteenth-century idea that evolution gives us the …

The status accorded the study of evolution is very much higher in the natural sciences than it
is in the social sciences. Evolutionary theory is the dominant, indeed the only, currently …

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use
of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary …

The study of cultural evolution using ideas from population biology began about 50 y ago,
with the work of LL Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus Feldman, and ourselves. It has grown from this …

Human cultural traits—behaviors, ideas, and technologies that can be learned from other
individuals—can exhibit complex patterns of transmission and evolution, and researchers …

Contemporary biologists, for the most part, are fairly sure that they know what they mean
by'evolution', and are convinced that it has occurred. In social science, however, the …

Suppose we give ourselves the goal of developing mechanistic and naturalistic causal
explanations of cultural phenomena.(I don't believe, by the way, that causal explanations are …

Whereas the previous chapter dealt with units of cultural transmission and mechanisms of
preservation and propagation, the goal of this chapter is to summarize and critique leading …