Culture and the Evolutionary Process: Boyd & Richerson Analyzed

Introduction

In the study of human evolution, natural science is generally treated as playing a more significant and dominant role than social science — specifically anthropology, or the study of culture. In the seminal work Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1988), authors Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson investigate and analyze the role that the evolutionary process plays in influencing cultural changes in populations. More specifically, the authors examine the interplay between culture and science in helping develop human society holistically — that is, both biologically and culturally.

Boyd and Richerson provide two general assumptions that support their central hypothesis, which posits that science and culture significantly influence each other in understanding the human evolutionary process. In the words of the authors, "process-oriented 'scientific' analyses help us understand how history works, and 'historical' data are essential to test scientific hypotheses about how populations and societies change" (Boyd & Richerson, 1992, p. 201).

The two general assumptions supporting the book's thesis are: (1) history is a determined pattern of cultural events that, when collated over time, can help us understand human culture across periods or within specific moments in time; and (2) these determined patterns of cultural changes and variations influenced human evolution simultaneously with the biological changes occurring in the living environment.

In order to establish the relationship between science and culture in promoting human evolution, Boyd and Richerson explicate the concept of cultural change as a precursor to history, to historical change, and ultimately to biological change in living organisms — particularly humans. Their exploration of the possible link between culture and science (specifically the evolutionary process) is not purely conceptual but methodological. Boyd and Richerson sought to prove that tracing cultural changes over time through evolutionary theories and techniques is both feasible and effective in uncovering the origins of human evolution, on both a biological and cultural level.

The Darwinian Framework Applied to Culture

With this methodology in hand, the analysis involved a "Darwinian approach" to culture — establishing the role that culture plays in determining history and influencing human behavior. The authors describe this framework as follows (p. 181):

The idea that unifies the Darwinian approach is that culture constitutes a system of inheritance. People acquire skills, beliefs, attitudes, and values from others by imitation and enculturation (social learning), and these "cultural variants," together with their genotypes and environments, determine their behavior. Since determinants of behavior are communicated from one person to another, individuals sample from and contribute to a collective pool of ideas that changes over time.

This passage foregrounds the discussion on the interdependence of both genetic and cultural determinants in human evolution. Boyd and Richerson illustrate how cultural change is induced in human society in much the same manner as biological changes altered the way humans evolved throughout history. Just as the process of elimination governed natural selection in Darwinian evolution, cultural changes and variation emerged from people's selection of specific traditions, beliefs, and language that came to dominate within a society during a specific period. The survival of a particular type of culture depends on several factors, foremost among them the dominance it holds within a society — that is, how frequently its traditions, values, and beliefs are practiced and upheld. Thus, "inheritance" in the case of culture refers to the traditions, belief systems, and values that have continued to prevail and develop, and that are still practiced by some societies today.

This "cultural version" of natural selection demonstrates that cultural change is no different from biological change in serving as a catalyst for human evolution. "Strings of cultural events," which constitute history, are defined as "just scientific explanations applied to systems that change through time" (p. 184). This assertion is further supported by the observation that, beyond biological and ecological changes, "culture itself becomes a divisive factor in the contemporary conditions of globalization and large, internally diverse societies" (Hanson, 2005, p. 67). This postmodern view of culture is applicable to the twentieth-century analyses introduced by Boyd and Richerson. In effect, the first assumption explains how culture gives rise to history, and within history "qualitatively different trajectories" occur: "...the dynamics of the system must be path dependent; isolated populations or societies must tend to diverge even when they start from the same initial condition and evolve in similar environments" (p. 186).

After establishing the crucial role that culture — and, more broadly, history — plays in human evolution, Boyd and Richerson turn to the interdependence of science and culture within the evolutionary process. As noted in the introduction, the authors posit that culture induces the evolutionary process in much the same way science does.

Conclusion

Acerbi's (2006) analysis of the relationship between culture and the evolutionary process reflected Boyd and Richerson's findings almost twenty years later. In that study, it was found that "the evolutionary process needs two mechanisms to operate: a mechanism of selective reproduction and a mechanism that constantly adds new variability." This new variability corresponds to the cultural analogs, which act as intervening factors in the development of society as a collective human group, affecting the social structures and functions that defined earlier societies and that continue to influence societies today.