The formal Darwinism project

[From time to time the Editors at Scientia Salon select an interesting paper from the primary scientific or philosophical literature to highlight for a broader public. These posts simply include the abstract of the paper and a few choice quotations, occasionally accompanied by brief editorial comments. The idea is to develop an appreciation for what front …

How Darwinian is cultural evolution?

by Scientia Salon This is a paper published by Nicolas Claidière, Thomas C. Scott-Phillips and Dan Sperber in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Series B, Biological Sciences), in 2014 (here is the open access link to the full article). The abstract states: Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of …