The main focus of my research over the years has been on cultural evolution. When I returned to this subject a few years after the publication of The Selfish Meme I chose not to use the terminology of memes, partly because it's a terminology that provokes some people to a knee-jerk rejection of the ideas that it seeks to express. A more positive reason was that, in The Selfish Meme, I had already demonstrated the workability of the meme concept, and I had been drawn, by the ideas that I explored and developed in that first book, to reflect further on the role of language in the evolution of human culture, and on the relationship between culture and the information on which it is based. Thus my aim in Cultural Evolution was to explore how a language-based theory of cultural evolution can help us to understand the complexity and diversity of human culture, and I don’t believe that this book’s discussion, which focuses on heritable information and its representation in natural and artefactual languages, would have benefited much from using the terminology of memetics.
In it, I propose a theory of cultural evolution and show how it can help us to understand the origin and development of human culture. I introduce the concept that humans share information not only in natural languages, which are spoken or signed, but also in artefactual languages like writing and musical notation, which use media that are made by humans. Languages enable humans to receive and transmit variations in cultural information and resources. In this way, they provide the mechanism for cultural evolution. The human capacity for metarepresentation - thinking about how we think - accelerates cultural evolution, because it frees cultural information from the conceptual limitations of each individual language. Finally, I show how the concept of cultural evolution outlined in this book can help us to understand the complexity and diversity of human culture, relating my theory to a range of subjects including economics, linguistics, and developmental biology.
Cultural Evolution is also available in Chinese.
I wrote a Foreword to the Chinese edition, and have also written a number of papers and talks based on the ideas in this book.
2021 - Natural and Artefactual Languages: A Mechanism for Cultural Evolution - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (1)
2015 - The Origins of Culture by Means of Natural and Artefactual Languages - in Barbora Půta and Václav Soupkup (eds), 'The Genesis of Creativity and the Origin of the Human Mind', Karolinum Press
2014 - Cultural Evolution - a paper presented at the Symposium, 'Is Innovation Evolutionary? Understanding the Processes Underlying Innovation', London, Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research with Matt Ridley, 8-9 July 2014
2013 - Representations in Languages - keynote paper presented at the Inaugural Colloquium of the Sheffield Hallam Organisational Ecology Group, 'Organisations as Ecologies', Sheffield, 4 July 2013
2012 - Symbolically Generalized Communication Media: A Category Mistake - Constructivist Foundations 8(1)