Abstract

This chapter makes a case for kinetic theories of culture as the most informative approaches to cultural evolution. The meme theory is dismissed on the grounds that it assumes the existence of cultural replicators. Once we expose the problems associated with cultural replicators, we also see the difficulties associated with the common claim that while biological evolution is Darwinian, cultural evolution is Lamarckian. Not all cultural selectionists endorse the meme theory. But this does not mean that cultural selectionism of a more general sort is free from problems. The arguments used to defend cultural selectionism are often historically implausible. The best defence of cultural selectionism, namely that an evolutionary approach gives theorists of culture access to a series of formal models adapted from population genetics, suggests a defence of kinetic theories of culture in general, rather than selectionist theories in particular.