Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. In DIT, culture is defined as information and behavior acquired through social learning. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.
Because genetic evolution is relatively well understood, most of DIT examines cultural evolution and the interactions between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.
Read more about Biocultural Evolution: Theoretical Basis, View of Culture, Genetic Influence On Cultural Evolution, Cultural Influences On Genetic Evolution, Mechanisms of Cultural Evolution, Social Learning and Cumulative Cultural Evolution, Cultural Group Selection, Historical Development, Current and Future Research, Criticisms
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)