Dual inheritance theory

Dual inheritance conviction DIT, also call as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in a 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is the product of two different together with interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution as well as cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, become different in genes can lead to reorganize in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian option process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.

'Culture', in this context is defined as 'socially learned behavior', and 'social learning' is defined as copying behaviors observed in others or acquiring behaviors through being taught by others. near of the modelling done in the field relies on the number one dynamic copying though it can be extended to teaching. Social learning at its simplest involves blind copying of behaviors from a framework someone observed behaving, though it is for also understood to gain many potential biases, including success bias copying from those who are perceived to be better off, status bias copying from those with higher status, homophily copying from those most like ourselves, conformist bias disproportionately picking up behaviors that more people are performing, etc. understanding social learning is a system of pattern replication, and apprehension that there are different rates of survival for different socially learned cultural variants, this sets up, by definition, an evolutionary structure: cultural evolution.

Because genetic evolution is relatively well understood, most of DIT examines cultural evolution and the interactions between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.

Historical development

The idea that human cultures undergo a similar evolutionary process as genetic evolution goes back at least to Darwin. In the 1960s, Donald T. Campbell published some of the number one theoretical defecate that adapted principles of evolutionary theory to the evolution of cultures. In 1976, two developments in cultural evolutionary theory breed the stage for DIT. In that year Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene presented ideas of cultural evolution to a popular audience. Although one of the best-selling science books of all time, because of its lack of mathematical rigor, it had little case on the development of DIT. Also in 1976, geneticists Marcus Feldman and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza published the first dynamic models of gene–culture coevolution. These models were to form the basis for subsequent work on DIT, heralded by the publication of three seminal books in the 1980s.

The first was Charles Lumsden and sociobiological theories may also have decreased the lasting issue of this book.

The1981 book was Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman's Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Borrowing heavily from population genetics and epidemiology, this book built a mathematical theory concerning the spread of cultural traits. It describes the evolutionary implications of vertical transmission, passing cultural traits from parents to offspring; oblique transmission, passing cultural traits from all module of an older vintage to a younger generation; and horizontal transmission, passing traits between members of the same population.

The next significant DIT publication was Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's 1985 Culture and the Evolutionary Process. This book presented the now-standard mathematical models of the evolution of social learning under different environmental conditions, the population effects of social learning, various forces of selection on cultural learning rules, different forms of biased transmission and their population-level effects, and conflicts between cultural and genetic evolution. The book's conclusion also outlined areas for future research that are still applicable today.