Digging the channels of inheritance: On how to distinguish between cultural and biological inheritance

Abstract

Theories of cultural evolution rest on the assumption that cultural inheritance is distinct from biological inheritance. Cultural and biological inheritance are two separate so-called channels of inheritance, two sub-systems of the sum total of developmental resources travelling in distinct ways between individual agents. This paper asks: what justifies this assumption? In reply, a philosophical account is offered that points at three related but distinct criteria that (taken together) make the distinction between cultural and biological inheritance not only precise but also justify it as real, i.e. as ontologically adequate. These three criteria are (i) the autonomy of cultural change, (ii) the near-decomposability of culture and (iii) differences in temporal order between cultural and biological inheritance. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.

Keywords: autonomous change; culture; inheritance; near‐decomposability; separateness; stability.

Figure 1.

Culture taking off. The horizontal axis represents time and physical persistence, which is taken to not evolve at all. The vertical axis represents accumulation of changes (or increase in complexity, even). Cultural evolution (the dotted line) is autonomously changing in relation to biological evolution (dashed line). B is the first animal using culture, while C denotes the beginning of our species and D the end of the nineteenth century. (Reprinted from [22]).

Figure 2.

Channels of transmission. The channels of inheritance are characterized as vertical, horizontal and oblique transmission modes, represented as arrows pointing vertically, obliquely to the right, and horizontally to the right. (Reprinted with permission from [35]. Permission granted by Springer Nature. Copyright © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited.)