Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges by Tim Lewens

by Tim Lewens

Tim Lewens aims to understand what it means to take an evolutionary approach to cultural change, and why it is that this approach is often treated with suspicion. Convinced of the exceptional power of natural selection, many thinkers--typically working in biological anthropology, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary biology--have suggested it should be freed from the confines of biology, and applied to cultural change in humans and other animals. At the same time, others-typically with backgrounds in disciplines like social anthropology and history-have been just as vocal in dismissing the evolutionary approach to culture. What drives these disputes over Darwinism in the social sciences? While making a case for the value of evolutionary thinking for students of culture, Lewens shows why the concerns of sceptics should not dismissed as mere prejudice, confusion, or ignorance. Indeed, confusions about what evolutionary approaches entail are propagated by their proponents, as well as by their detractors. By taking seriously the problems faced by these approaches to culture, Lewens shows how such approaches can be better formulated, where their most significant limitations lie, and how the tools of cultural evolutionary thinking might become more widely accepted.

Genres: Science, Anthropology

Hardcover

First published October 1, 2015

Reviews

[Piet van den Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book zooms out and asks if the academic tradition of cultural evolution actually constitutes a valuable approach to understanding human culture. It considers some existing criticisms and mostly concludes that cultural evolution is ok. It also considers some more tangential topics, such as how the concept of "human nature" is used and whether it makes sense to use this term at all. I think this is more relevant if you're less acquainted with the field of cultural evolution in the first place, to put things a bit more in perspective. For me this was a good book to read. Even though I work in the field myself I have long had lingering doubts about it. It was good to just see some of these voiced more explicitly and the book argued well that the approach can be valuable but also has its own specific niche (it is not a candidate for replacing the human sciences wholesale). Very nice to get that more birdseye perspective on the field. The book doesn't really come to a clear synthesis in which the various criticisms/arguments that are dealt with are integrated into some coherent overall view, but I don't think this was the aim and indeed this may not be useful/desirable for a book like this anyway. Overall very solid and it helped my perspective on the field.

[Nat]

I bought this probably back in 2018-2019 when I was working on an ERC grant (which I did not get) that would use some methods from cultural evolution to investigate meaning change. This makes a convincing case for an eclectic approach to thinking about cultural evolution, treating it as a form of "population thinking", which involves understanding complex social behavior as the result of interactions between its constituent members, mainly by building mathematical models that explain things like the "S-curve" associated with the uptake of new forms of technology. This is a resolutely "individualist" approach to social explanation, and Lewens has an illuminating discussion of critics of this approach who complain about it ignoring "power"—basically the effects of super influential individuals or institutions.