Self-recommending. One excerpt:
Contrast cultural evolution with genetic natural selection. In the latter, high fidelity information is transmitted from parent to offspring in particulate form. Cultural transmission (whatever the cultural unit is) is lower-fidelity and can be in multiple directions. For genetic natural selection, selection is at the level of the gene, but the future of a gene and its vessels are typically tightly coupled within a generation. Not so with culture. As a result we shouldn’t expect to see the types of results we see in population/quantitative genetics in the cultural sphere. But can cultural evolution get even close?
Suppose that we define culture as socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies. Then cultural evolution would be the process by which the “fittest” thought patterns and behavioral tendencies survive. One can imagine that such a process could be extremely messy. There are non-linear interactions among thought patterns and behavioral tendencies. We would expect the evolutionary process to make a lot of mistakes, and indeed a little reflection would tell you that we have seen a lot of mistakes.
I’m not sure I agree. If you consider ‘evolution’ at the company/organization level rather than the human level, this process should tightly couple the fate of a cultural/social change within a company with the fate of the company within a ‘generation’. Those changes are then passed on to future organizations via the employees (‘I used to work at Google and this policy worked really well’)
I think this is a exaggeration of the fidelity of genetic transmission. First a parent transmits only half of their own genetic information, so while the information that they do transmit is high fidelity when you look at how much information gets transmitted it is much reduced. Once that information is transmitted it is interpreted differently, because the offspring has a different combination of genes than either parent. The phenotype is different, which is the expression of the genes together. Looking at selection at the level of the gene is a fairly bogus analogy, or at least a misleading one.