Some quotes from cultural evolution studies

These references are to relevant contemporary studies and approaches.


Cultural evolution is a very big dog

Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd:
(Extracts from Not by Genes Alone - How culture transformed human evolution
(University of Chicago Press, paperback edition, 2006)

(p253) Can we influence the current evolution of human societies in desirable directions? As humans, we are unusually active agents in our own evolution, because we each choose which cultural variants to adopt and which to neglect. Moreover, we organize institutions ranging from a simple tribal council to highly complex modern ones, such as the research university and the political party, that are designed to direct the course of cultural evolution. Yet, cultural evolution is a very big dog on the end of our leash. Even cultural heroes leading great political movements typically have modest effects. Gandhi could not prevent the muslims from leaving India, nor could he persuade Hindus to reform the caste system.
Only by attending properly to the population-level processes can we arrive at a proper picture of cultural evolution. With a reasonable picture of cultural evolution in hand, we could begin to understand how we might humanize processes that often exact savage costs in the currency of human misery...
Culture is stored in populations, so understanding human brains and how populations change requires population thinking. Darwinian accounts are one part book-keeping - a quantitative description of cultural variation and its change through time. In addition they are one part quantitative budget analysis - a systematic attribution of changes to causal processes. If you are going to study cultural evolution in a serious way, you are going to be driven to Darwinian methods of analysis. You have to be able to describe change and you have to be able to account for change...
Much of the objection to applying Darwinian tools to the human case seems to come from a visceral dislike of picturing us as "just another unique species". From the evolutionist's point of view, human exceptionalism is a major problem. As long as humans stand outside the Darwinian synthesis, as long as human culture is said to be superorganic, the whole Darwinian project has a potentially fatal gap...

(p256) We are constantly struck by the way our naive intuitions are confounded and then rebuilt along new lines by the results of models... We saw that Alan Rogers's very simple model in which social learning evolved without being adaptive led to some real insights into exactly what properties are needed for culture to be adaptive...
A good set of data is a beautiful thing to behold. Foolish, of course, is the empiricist who thinks that even the most beautiful set of data captures any complex phenomenon completely, especially one who thinks that the data from his own case applies without exception to a diverse system such as human culture. However, data are the ultimate arbiter. More than just testing hypotheses, data often start us thinking in the first place...
Many scholars poke fun at cultural explanations for their supposed lack of sophistication, and argue cogently that innate information, rational calculation, and ecological variation are quite plausible alternatives to cultural explanations. In any given case, perhaps, such alternatives are correct, but as general arguments against culture, the empirical data are clear enough. Cultural scientists have developed a considerable body of elegantly compelling, even if largely qualitative, data. The importance of cultural variation in the human species is hardly more dubious than the role of gravity in the motions of the planets. As with models, the empirical picture gets built bit by bit, gradually constraining the range of plausible explanations with ever better data...