ABSTRACT
The starting point for a populational theory of culture is to recognize that cultural systems, for all else that they may or may not be, consist of information that is socially conveyed through space and time within a social group. Cultural change shows up as change in the relative frequencies of socially transmitted variants within the pool—in other words, as change by differential social replication, or cultural evolution. A personal favorite, just to give a single example, is the concept of cultural homology, since in a system of “descent with modification” one expects to find many, many similarities among separate, even distant, cultural systems that trace to shared historical origins and are thus features “sprung from a common source.” The one that comes immediately to mind is to restrict the “cultural” to the subset of socially conveyed information that is also symbolically encoded.
