ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes the hypotheses that the cultural characteristics of human social groups result to a large extent from internal, individual-level selective retention, and more importantly, that this process generally selects for cultural attributes that enhance the ability of their carriers to survive and reproduce. A wide variety of theories are explicit and implicit in the anthropological literature and a number of them have been successful at explaining some within-group and between-group variations in human culture. As with organic evolution, where an individual-versus group-selection debate has been argued for over a decade, the important question concerns not the possibility of cultural selection at group and higher levels, but rather the relative effectiveness and direction of selection at those levels. A coevolutionary perspective implies that for both biological and cultural reasons the interdependence of individual fitnesses among members of a social group can be viewed as the social glue that holds human groups together.
