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The (Dis)Unity of Cultural Evolutionary Theory

Tim Lewens (2015) Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN: 978-0-19-967418-3, 205 Pages, Price: $45.00 (Hardcover)

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Notes

  1. Content biases are sometimes considered as a cultural analog of meiotic drive. I suspect that Lewens has this in mind when he argues that the kinetic interpretation better preserves the “taxonomic precision” of Richerson and Boyd’s and Sperber’s formulations of cultural evolutionary theory. I cannot dwell on this point but, as Mesoudi (Cultural Evolution, 2011, p. 65) has—in my opinion correctly—pointed out, variational processes like meiotic drive imply the transformation of a variant and, therefore, they should be distinguished from cases, like the one at stake here, where what changes is the frequency of the variant, and not its features.

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  1. Center of Natural and Human Sciences, Federal University of ABC, São Bernardo do Campo, SP, Brazil

    Lorenzo Baravalle

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  1. Lorenzo Baravalle
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Correspondence to Lorenzo Baravalle.

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Baravalle, L. The (Dis)Unity of Cultural Evolutionary Theory. Sci & Educ 27, 225–231 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-017-9951-x

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