Is cultural change adaptive?. Comment on 'An evolutionary framework for cultural change: Selectionism versus communal exchange' by Liane Gabora

摘要

Professor Gabora makes two principal arguments: First, that Darwinian or selectionist frameworks are not indicated for the modeling of cultural change; and, second, that non-Darwinian approaches, and more specifically, communal or network-based exchange models, are capable of yielding superior explanatory and predictive success. On the first point, I find Gabora's argument thoroughly convincing, though the reader should know I am an economist who has expressed skepticism toward attempts to model things like business success or failure, institutional change, or variegated market rules, by the generalization of natural selection (see). I am less convinced on the second point, particularly Gabora's intrepid claim, in reference to communal exchange, that "[i]f it took time for natural selection to emerge as the mechanism by which life evolves, it seems reasonable that culture, too, would evolve by way of this more primitive mechanism" (p. 19).