ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a framework within which the actual phenotypic constitution of individuals and their unique experience, as well as the level of cultural development which they represent, may be implicated. Only by bringing about a nexus between particular individuals and particular cultural forms can we provide a basis for discussing cultural evolution as still a part of biological evolution, instead of insisting, as both A. L. Kroeber and Julian S. Huxley do, that genetic evolution has ceased to be significant. Huxley has also emphasized the importance of convergence as unique to human evolution. Cultural evolution depends, ultimately, on small crucial innovations that occur at points of divergence in history. Although each attained grade of development contains within it the possibility of a series of further grades, the potential advances toward the next grade actually are taken by groups of particular individuals.
