It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission".
Today, cultural evolution has become the basis for a growing field of scientific research in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, psychology, and organizational studies.
The approaches differ not just in the history of their development and discipline of origin but in how they conceptualize the process of cultural evolution and the assumptions, theories, and methods that they apply to its study.
[9] He argued for both customs (1874 p. 239) and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language.
[10][9][11] Darwin's ideas, along with those of such as Comte and Quetelet, influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Hodgson and Knudsen[12] single out David George Ritchie and Thorstein Veblen, crediting the former with anticipating both dual inheritance theory and universal Darwinism.
The early years of the 20th century and particularly World War I saw biological concepts and metaphors shunned by most social sciences.
[16] The argument thereby introduced as to whether cultural evolution requires neurological instructions continues to the present day [citation needed].
[3][17][18] Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century declared indigenous culture to have "no arts, no letters, no society" and he described facing life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
He, like other scholars of his time, reasoned that everything positive and esteemed resulted from the slow development away from this poor lowly state of being.
[3] Franz Boas, a German-born anthropologist, was the instigator of the movement known as 'cultural particularism' in which the emphasis shifted to a multilinear approach to cultural evolution.
'Evolution and Culture' by Sahlins and Service is an attempt to condense the views of White and Steward into a universal theory of multilinear evolution.
Along with the "virus of the mind" image, the meme might be thought of as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.
Karl Popper used Newtonian physics as an example of a body of theories so thoroughly confirmed by testing as to be considered unassailable, but they were nevertheless improved on by Albert Einstein's bold insights into the nature of space-time.
[27][28][29][30] More recently, cultural evolution has drawn conversations from multi-disciplinary sources with movement towards a unified view between the natural and social sciences.
There remains some accusation of biological reductionism, as opposed to cultural naturalism, and scientific efforts are often mistakenly associated with Social Darwinism.
They argue that both mechanisms coexist in cultural evolution, making it essential to empirically determine their prevalence in different contexts, addressing confusion in the field.
[33][29][34] Some recent approaches, such as dual inheritance theory, make use of empirical methods including psychological and animal studies, field site research, and computational models.