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Organic evolutionists began to use [[mathematical models]] to investigate the properties of [[evolution]] in the first quarter of the 20th Century. The aim of the effort was to take the micro-scale properties of individuals and [[genes]], scale them up to a [[population]] of individuals and deduce the long run evolutionary consequences of the assumed micro level processes. [[Empiricists]] have a handle on both the micro scale processes and the long run results, but not on what happens over many generations in between. Moreover, human [[intuition]] is not so good at envisioning the behavior of populations over long spans of time. Hence [[mathematics]] proved an invaluable aid.
Beginning with the pioneering work of [[Lucca Cavalli-Sforza]] and [[Marc Feldman]] (1981) in the early 1970s, these methods were adapted to study [[cultural evolution]]. The problem is somewhat the same as organic evolution. People acquire information from others by learning and teaching. [[Cultural]] transmission is imperfect, so the transmission is not always exact. People invent new cultural variants, making culture a system for the inheritance of acquired variation. People also pick and choose the cultural variants they adopt and use, processes that are not possible in the genetic system (although in the case of [[sexual selection]] individuals may choose mates with the objective of getting good genes for their offspring). [[Social scientists]] know a fair amount about such things, enough to build reasonable mathematical representations of the micro-level processes of cultural evolution. The theory is of the form
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Contemporary work in the dual inheritance/gene-culture coevolution tradition includes empirical studies designed to test ideas derived from the [[mathematical theory]].
[[Category:Evolution]]
[[Category:Sociology]]
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