Robin Allott

The relation of evolution and culture has been much debated. There have been
many different approaches, of which the most notable have been those of
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, Lumsden and Wilson, and Boyd and Richerson.
Also noteworthy are the views of Durham and Hinde and most recently of the
evolutionary psychologists. If these other accounts, or any one of them, seem
to cover the subject adequately and to be intellectually satisfying, no new ap-
proach would be needed. The first step, then, is to summarize and assess the
theories that have been presented.

Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman ( 1981) adopted a quantitative approach. After
pointing out that up to that date cultural transmission had received little atten-
tion, they stressed the need for a theory of cultural change; they chose to develop
a mathematical theory since the modern theory of biological evolution owed
much of its strength to the mathematical background, primarily in population
genetics. They sought to deal with the dynamics of the changes within a pop-
ulation of the relative frequencies of the forms of a cultural trait under defined
cultural interactions, while recognizing that for humans it is difficult to partition
the process of transmission into purely genetic and purely cultural components.
Cultural traits vary in significance. There are relatively trivial ones (innovations
such as the spread of Coca-Cola or volleyball) where participation in the trait
cannot appreciably alter the probability of surviving or having children; in these
instances some kind of non-Darwinian selection is involved that they termed

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