PSYC 3100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Cultural Evolution, Circular Reasoning, Dual Inheritance Theory
10 Dec 2018
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Evolutionary psychology lecture 23 culture and cultural differences. The evolution of culture: when we talk about cultural evolution we are not talking about progress, we are talking about change- good and bad things can come from this. Memes: the new replicators (reading: language seems to evolve" by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. It is our own species that really shows what cultural evolution can do. Language is only one example out of many. The answer is that they are replicators: a new kind of a replicator is human culture, but we can call it a meme. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrased, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain: consider the idea of god- we do not know how it arose in the meme pool.
