Lorenzo Baravalle, Cultural evolutionary theory as a theory of forces,
Synthese, May 2019, DOI: 10.1007/s11229-019-02247-0.
Downloadable Preprint.
Abstract: Cultural evolutionary theory has been alternatively compared to a theory of forces, such as Newtonian mechanics, or the kinetic theory of gases. In this article, I clarify the scope and significance of these metatheoretical characterisations. First, I discuss the kinetic analogy, which has been recently put forward by Tim Lewens. According to it, cultural evolutionary theory is grounded on a bottom-up methodology, which highlights the additive effects of social learning biases on the emergence of large-scale cultural phenomena. Lewens ...
