When it comes to predicting human behavior, culture plays an extremely important role. It can be said that it is at the heart of the picture. Authors have characterized culture in academic terms. Primarily, ‘culture consists in the beliefs, values, norms, desires, techniques, and so on, that people acquire by social learning.’ (Boyd & Richerson, 2005). The authors argue that cultural transmission is not always correct because cultural items can be altered, for example due to inaccuracies in transmission and due to individual input which changes the culture.
Moreover, it is argued that not all variants of culture are equal. Boyd & Richerson (2005), point out a wide array of biases which account for transmission of some variants of culture over …show more content…
This is also one important issue which accounts for the unpredictability of human behavior. So processes which are repeated generation after generation also impact the patterns of variations of cultural values. It is stated that: ‘Culture completely changes the way that human evolution works, but not because culture is learned. Rather, the capital fact is that human-style social learning creates a novel evolutionary trade-off. Social learning allows human populations to accumulate reservoirs of adaptive information over many generations, leading to the cumulative cultural evolution of highly adaptive behaviors and technology. Because this process is much faster than genetic evolution, it allows human populations to evolve (culturally) adaptations to local environments.’ (Richerdson & Boyd, 2008).
Furthermore, culture has to be viewed as a Darwinian evolutionary process. This is due to the fact that culture changes ideas and values which people hold as these cultural variants become more accepted and popular as others diminish. A large proportion of these processes is rooted in human psychology because some beliefs are more accepted in human behavior than others which make them more or less likely to be
Moreover, it is argued that not all variants of culture are equal. Boyd & Richerson (2005), point out a wide array of biases which account for transmission of some variants of culture over …show more content…
This is also one important issue which accounts for the unpredictability of human behavior. So processes which are repeated generation after generation also impact the patterns of variations of cultural values. It is stated that: ‘Culture completely changes the way that human evolution works, but not because culture is learned. Rather, the capital fact is that human-style social learning creates a novel evolutionary trade-off. Social learning allows human populations to accumulate reservoirs of adaptive information over many generations, leading to the cumulative cultural evolution of highly adaptive behaviors and technology. Because this process is much faster than genetic evolution, it allows human populations to evolve (culturally) adaptations to local environments.’ (Richerdson & Boyd, 2008).
Furthermore, culture has to be viewed as a Darwinian evolutionary process. This is due to the fact that culture changes ideas and values which people hold as these cultural variants become more accepted and popular as others diminish. A large proportion of these processes is rooted in human psychology because some beliefs are more accepted in human behavior than others which make them more or less likely to be