We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue
that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with …

Modern phylogenetic methods are increasingly being used to address questions about
macro-level patterns in cultural evolution. These methods can illuminate the unobservable …

Charles Darwin changed the course of scientific thinking by showing how evolution
accounts for the stunning diversity and biological complexity of life on earth. Recently, there …

Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral
traditions associated with different cultures. According to the 'historic-geographic'school, it is …

In the past few decades, scholars from several disciplines have pursued the curious parallel
noted by Darwin between the genetic evolution of species and the cultural evolution of …

Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to
broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic …

Phase transitions--changes between different states of organization in a complex system--
have long helped to explain physics concepts, such as why water freezes into a solid or …

We are amidst an ongoing flood of sequence data arising from the application of high-
throughput technologies, and a concomitant fundamental revision in our understanding of …

This discussion paper responds to two recent articles in Biology and Philosophy that raise
similar objections to cultural attraction theory, a research trend in cultural evolution putting …

Biological evolution has parallels with the development of natural languages, man-made
artifacts, and manuscript texts. As a result, phylogenetic methods developed for evolutionary …