Where Did Culture Come From? Evolutionary Foundations of Cultural Diversity
Where Did Culture Come From? Evolutionary Foundations of Cultural Diversity

Summary/Abstract: The existence of different cultures remains a puzzle in our evolutionary history. There is, apparently, a process of “downward causation”, in the sense that (national) cultures are collective facts and mental programs outside the individuals and influence them from top tobottom. Here I propose that human societies and cultures, as a whole, end up fulfilling the basic requirements of biological evolution, producing variation for diversity, selection for the retention of solutions and stability for the transmission of collective options throughout time and between social groups of such diverse magnitude and scale that they range from a few thousand to more than a billion individuals. This is something that occurs in all human societies. In sum, we claim that cultural variations are the result of various adaptive responses of phenotypes in their bio-economic optimization of permanent pressures of various environments and local conditions

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