Why Culture Isn’t Darwinian (and it’s Misleading Even to Say “Not Strictly Darwinian”)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Culture evolves; i.e., exhibits cumulative, adaptive, open-ended change. The theory of biological evolution through natural selection integrated the life sciences under one explanatory umbrella. Many suggest that this theory can also explain cultural evolution, integrating the social sciences under one explanatory umbrella as well. Darwin’s theory solved the problem of how change persists in lineages despite that acquired traits aren’t transmitted. Culture doesn’t suffer from this problem; once one teapot had a handle, all teapots could have handles. Culture also lacks the algorithmic structure necessary for natural selection to be applicable. We have two systems of transmission, but only one system of inheritance. (If your parents’ bone repair genes never turn on, you still inherit them, and your bones heal. But if they don’t teach you to ski, you can’t ski. That’s because ski knowledge is acquired, not inherited.) Natural selection explains cumulative, adaptive change through differential reproduction of randomly generated heritable variations. Cultural evolution violates the necessary conditions for natural selection to be a viable theory: random variation, discrete units that compete and are copied with high fidelity, and vertical transmission of inherited traits (not horizontal transmission of acquired traits). To claim Darwin thought natural selection is mere ‘variation + selection’ undercuts his accomplishment; he recognized the significance of distinguishing between inherited and acquired traits. Darwinian models of culture portray similarity due to horizontal transfer as similarity due to common ancestry. Cultural Darwinists soldier on by ignoring cultural change that occurs during the generation, expression, and reception of ideas. But to maintain a Darwinian perspective on culture we must view humans as passive imitators and transmitters of pre-packaged cultural units, ignoring the spark of creativity and intelligence that define our humanness. It’s time to figure out what kind of evolutionary framework can accommodate the network-like patterns observed in culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".