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.
Famous quotes containing the words cultural, selection and/or theory:
“The rumor of a great city goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of the known earth. The city becomes an emblem in remote minds; apart from the tangible export of goods and men, it exerts its cultural instrumentality in a thousand phases.”
—In New York City, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.”
—Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)
“By the “mud-sill” theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly.... Free labor insists on universal education.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)