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==Evolution and Culture==
Beginning with the pioneering work of [[Lucca Cavalli-Sforza]] and [[Marcus 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 | |||