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 Dual Inheritance Theory: 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
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“I call it our collective inheritance of isolation. We inherit isolation in the bones of our lives. It is passed on to us as sure as the shape of our noses and the length of our legs. When we are young, we are taught to keep to ourselves for reasons we may not yet understand. As we grow up we become the “men who never cry” and the “women who never complain.” We become another generation of people expected not to bother others with our problems.”
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“... the first reason for psychology’s failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology’s failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.”
—Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)