Current darwinism in social science

Christophe Heintz, Nicolas Claidiére

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesChapterpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Darwinian theories concerned with human behaviour come in many forms. They can describe both the biological evolution of human cognition and the evolution of cultural traits in human communities. We briefl y review these two types of Darwinian theories, including socio-biology, evolutionary psychology, memetics and dual inheritance theory, and show how insights from both types can be combined in a single framework: cultural epidemiology. We argue, however, that this is profi table only if selectionists models of cultural evolution are replaced by an attractor model.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHandbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences
PublisherSpringer Netherlands
Pages781-807
Number of pages27
ISBN (Electronic)9789401790147
ISBN (Print)9789401790130
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2015

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