The evolution of ‘culture’: Juggling a concept

Abstract

Although the concept of culture was severely criticized in the second half of the twentieth century, its explanatory use has not been abandoned. Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists have more recently used the concept in models and theories of culture. This use renews the hope that the concept of culture can be explanatorily useful within the social sciences, especially since the new definition of culture connects with both the idea of evolution and with the other natural sciences. In this paper, I analyze the models of cultural evolution developed by Cultural Evolutionary Science (CES), more specifically gene-culture coevolution theoretical models and dual-inheritance theories. I argue that even if CES scholars mostly claim that for them, culture is equal to information, some of these models have aspirations to bring back cultures as discrete units that resemble the social anthropological models of culture that have been already abandoned. I discuss evolutionists’ and social anthropologists’ objections to these models. I claim that despite the popularity of cultural evolutionist theories, social scientists (cultural anthropologists and historians, for example) should remain skeptical about the possibility that this approach can assume an explanatory role for a concept of culture.