The Evolution of Cultural Entities Proceedings of the British Academy Series, Vol. Vol. 112

Ever since Darwin, scholars have noted that cultural entities such as languages, laws, firms and theories seem to 'evolve' through sequences of variation, selection and replication, in many ways just like living organisms. These essays consider whether this comparison is 'just a metaphor', or whether modern evolutionary theory can help us to understand the dynamics of different cultural domains. The 'evolutionary paradigm of rationality' has a significant role to play throughout the human sciences, but raises complex issues in every cultural context where it is applied. By fostering discussion between scholars from a wide range of research traditions, this volume aims to influence the evolution of all of them.

John Ziman: Introduction: Selectionist Reasoning as a Tool of Thought, W. G. Runciman: Heritable Variation and Competitive Selection as the Mechanism of Sociocultural Evolution, Eva Jablonka: Between Development and Evolution: How to Model Cultural Change, Tim Ingold: Between Evolution and History: Biology, Culture and the Myth of Human Origins, C. A. Hooker: An Integrating Scaffold: Toward an Autonomy-Theoretic Modelling of Cultural Change, Adam Kuper: Culture, Henry Plotkin: Learning from Culture, Mary Midgley: Choosing the Selectors, Richard R. Nelson: Evolutionary Theorizing in Economics, Brian J. Loasby: The Evolution of Technological Knowledge: Reflections on Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, Gunther Teubner: Idiosyncratic Production Regimes: Co-evolution of Economic and Legal Institutions in the Varieties of Capitalism, Joan Solomon: The Evolution of Education: Change and Reform, Susantha Goonatilake: The Evolution of Merged Culture, Genes and Computing Artefacts