Cumulative cultural evolution can create complex, well-designed adaptations without any designer

Evidence

Famous evolutionary psychologists, from Steve Pinker to David Buss, are fond of claiming that natural selection is the only process capable of creating complex adaptations that are functionally well designed to meet environmental challenges or the demands of organisms’ lives. … However, I part ways with them on the word “only.” At least since the rise of cumulative cultural evolution, natural selection has lost its status as the only “dumb” process capable of creating complex adaptations well fit to local circumstances. As this chapter aimed to show, cultural evolution, through the selective attention and learning processes discussed in chapters 4 and 5 , as well as others I’ve not mentioned, is fully cable of generating these complex adaptive products, which no one designed or had a causal mental model of before they emerged. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 379

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that cultural evolution is posed as a second ‘blind’ design process rivaling natural selection in power.
• XREF: connects to: Culture supplied the water capacity that genes alone could not, enabling endurance running adaptations — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 256; Adaptive complexity can come from cumulative culture, not genes or intention — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 384; Observational learning enables cumulative cultural evolution of behaviors no individual could invent alone — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 19 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Adaptive complexity can come from cumulative culture, not genes or intention #expands (0.95) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 384
• Adaptive culture often arises without individual designers even noticing. #expands (0.88) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 138
• Observational learning enables cumulative cultural evolution of behaviors no individual could invent alone #expands (0.85) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 19
• Survival rests on inherited cultural adaptations no individual could improvise alone #expands (0.78) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 117
• Human cumulative culture emerges from evolved domain-specific cognitive adaptations for social learning #qualifies (0.72) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 16