Cultural selection theory is a scientific discipline that explores sociological and cultural evolution the same way that Darwinian selection theory is used to explain biological evolution.
This theory is an extension of memetics. In memetics, memes, much like biology's genes, are informational units passed through generations of culture. However, unlike memetics, cultural selection theory moves past these isolated "memes" to encompass selection processes, including continuous and quantitative parameters. Two other approaches to cultural selection theory are social contagion and evolutionary epistemology.
A good example of this theory is found by looking to the reason large businesses tend to grow larger. The answer includes the benefits of mass production and distribution, international advertising, and more funds for product development. These self-amplifying effects, known as the economies of scale, give rise to selection effects which have a quantitative nature, unlike the qualitative effects described by the theory of memetics.
On the whole, cultural selection theory embraces the inherent complexity of cultural change and vouches for a systemic, rather than deconstructionist, approach to analyzing the way a society's norms and values change.
The Cultural Selection theory faces many objections due to the lack of evidence to support the adaption of natural selection in the structural mechanisms of cultural systems. Major objections against the Cultural Selection Theory stem from Lamarckianism, Genotype-phenotype distinction, Common Hereditary Architecture, Biological Analogue for Cultural Units, and Environmental Interactions. Some have argued that in order for the Cultural Selection Theory to stand strong against objections, conclusive and explicit case studies are required. There needs to be empirical support to clarify the interaction between cultural systems and their environments. Crozier conducted a study on the acoustic adaptation of bird songs. This research study provided empirical evidence to support and strengthen the Cultural Selection Theory.
Like Darwin's natural selection theory, cultural selection theory has three phases too; variation, reproduction and selection. Variation gives rise to a subject, reproduction is responsible for the spread and selection is based on the factors that control the spread.
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“By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression.”
—Dan Cruickshank (b. 1949)
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—H.L. (Henry Lewis)