Cultural evolution
Cultural evolution is the change and transmission of learned behaviors, beliefs, skills, and other cultural traits across generations and populations.
Social learning: Learning by observing or interacting with other people. It transmits cultural traits between individuals without requiring each person to rediscover them.
Culture: Shared learned information, practices, symbols, and norms within a group. Cultural evolution concerns changes in this socially shared inheritance.
Cultural anthropology: The study of human cultures, social practices, meanings, and institutions. Ethnographic accounts provide evidence about how practices vary and spread.
Cultural group selection: A process in which cultural differences between groups affect their persistence or expansion. It offers an account of how group-level competition can favor cooperative norms.
Biological evolution: Change in heritable traits of populations across generations through variation and evolutionary processes. It shares evolutionary logic with cultural change but transmits traits through genes.
Cultural transmission: The transfer of information, practices, or beliefs between people or generations. It is the pathway through which cultural traits move and change.
Cultural trait: A learned or socially transmitted feature of behavior, belief, knowledge, or practice. Traits are the units whose transmission and variation cultural evolution studies.
Evolutionary anthropology: The study of human behavior and societies using evolutionary theory. Cultural evolution developed within a broader effort to explain human change evolutionarily.
Social norms: Shared expectations about behavior that groups enforce through approval, disapproval, or sanctions. Norms spread and persist through social learning and enforcement.
Lamarckism: The historical theory that acquired characteristics can be inherited by offspring. Cultural transmission resembles inheritance of acquired traits, but operates through learning rather than genes.