Current Darwinism in social science

Abstract

Darwinian theories concerned with human behaviour come in many forms. They can describe both the biological evolution of human cognition and the evolution of cultural traits in human communities. We briefly review these two types of Darwinian theories, including socio-biology, evolutionary psychology, memetics and dual inheritance theory, and show how insights from both types can be combined in a single framework: cultural epidemiology. We argue, however, that this is profitable only if selectionists models of cultural evolution are replaced by an attractor model.