ABSTRACT
The theory of cultural evolution is supposed to provide an explanation of the success of a particular cultural practice or cultural belief in human history. Cultural evolution might diverge from biological evolution when we are misled by innate predispositions to adopt a cultural behaviour that turns out to be maladaptive. All modern theories of cultural evolution – adaptationism, cultural group selection, memetics and culture-gene co-evolution – seem to underscore the usefulness of a Darwinian approach in the study of culture. The memetic approach has not gone unchallenged in the cultural-evolutionist literature. Two closely interrelated objections have been raised against this way of dealing with cultural reproduction and evolution. Cultural evolution starts off as a fully Darwinian process, with memes competing with each other to colonise human minds and thus produce copies of themselves, in exactly the same way as genes compete with each other for the same purpose.
