The Evolutionary Neuroscience of Cultural Evolution

Abstract Evolutionary neuroscience seeks to understand the origins and diversification of mental processes by evaluating comparative evidence of modern brain and behavioural variation in light of known evolutionary and developmental processes, primary archaeological and paleontological evidence of the past, and the modern experimental and real-world analogies needed to interpret this primary evidence. Dual Inheritance Theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution, identifies high fidelity social transmission and selective copying of cultural variants as key engines of human biocultural evolution, and thus logical targets for an evolutionary neuroscience of cultural evolution. However, evolutionary neuroscientific investigation of these capacities casts doubt on the fundamental DIT assumptions of a sharp dichotomy between individual and social learning and the content neutrality of cultural evolutionary processes. This undermines the view of human cultural evolution as a species typical capacity with a discrete origin and suggests that more diverse and contingent explanations of then history of human biocultural evolution are needed.