ABSTRACT
Cultural heritage has a broad series of positive analogies to biological processes, but confusion due to negative analogies is quite real. The aim of this chapter is to show how exploration of positive analogies can help illuminate the study of culture without undue confusion due to dissimilarities between the two kinds of inheritance systems. Generalizing the concept of inheritance from the perspective of evolutionary biology draws attention to two elements: what is transmitted and how it is transmitted. In the classic biological case, these topics are the provinces of genetics and population genetics, respectively. Of course, there is no way to draw a clean distinction between the basic elements or units of an inheritance system and the patterns of transmission that generate population level effects, which are, in turn, the focus of the interaction of inheritance systems with environments that produce the actual forces of evolutionary change. This chapter presents taxonomies of both, and discusses their implications when applied to culture. The next chapter turns to the main processes of change.
