The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Facilitates Evolutionary Models of Culture Change

Authors

Cameron M. Smith, Portland State UniversityFollow
Liane Gabora, University of British Columbia
William Gardner-O’Kearney, Portland State UniversityFollow

Published In

Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2018

Subjects

Social evolution, Social Darwinism, Human evolution, Variation (Biology), Extended evolutionary synthesis

Abstract

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is beginning to fulfill the whole promise of Darwinian insight through its extension of evolutionary understanding from the biological domain to include cultural information evolution. Several decades of important foundation-laying work took a social Darwinist approach and exhibited ecologically-deterministic elements. This is not the case for more recent developments to the evolutionary study of culture, which emphasize non-Darwinian processes such as self-organization, potentiality, and epigenetic change.

DOI

10.21237/C7clio9235187

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/27948

Citation Details

Smith, Cameron M., Liana Gabora, and William Gardner-O’Kearny. 2018. Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Paves the Way for a Theory of Cultural Evolution. Cliodynamics 9: 84–107.