Cultural species and their ecosystems

David Wilson ()

Journal of Bioeconomics, 2014, vol. 16, issue 1, 38 pages

Abstract: The target article was written for a workshop that I organized with Lin Ostrom titled “Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution”. In my commentary, I describe the background for the workshop and target article in addition to commenting on the article itself. A compelling case can be made for functionally organized human groups as like species that adapt to their local environments. A cultural inheritance mechanism is required for this to happen, which functions analogously to genetic inheritance, although the mechanistic details need not be analogous. Indeed, a diversity of cultural inheritance mechanisms are possible that need not be mechanistically analogous to each other. In addition, most modern human populations consist of a diversity of functionally organized groups, or cultural ecosystems. The distinction between “species” and “ecosystem” is important because the concept of an inheritance system applies primarily to the former. Finally, positive cultural evolution in modern large-scale society must be engineered and an explicitly evolutionary perspective will add value to the enterprise. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10818-013-9170-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbioec:v:16:y:2014:i:1:p:31-38

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10818/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10818-013-9170-8

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Bioeconomics is currently edited by Ulrich Witt, Michael T. Ghiselin and David Sloan Wilson

More articles in Journal of Bioeconomics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().