Summary
Cultural evolution is the theory that culture changes over time by something like Darwinian evolution. It treats culture as information – ideas, skills, habits – that people pick up from one another through teaching and imitation: variants arise, some spread and others fade. Nineteenth-century anthropologists used the idea to rank societies on one ladder from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilisation’, a scheme since rejected and widely seen as racist. The modern field, revived from the 1960s by Donald T. Campbell and others, makes no such ranking.
Its boldest claim is that culture and biology shape each other. Joseph Henrich argues that the products of cultural evolution “have driven our genetic evolution”.
Rationale
Culture as content handed from mind to mind is too thin a picture for us: Part 2 describes “the multiple and messy ways we embody, enact, make sense of and remake culture”.