Evolu t ion Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture , Part I Theoretical Considerations

Culture is the ongoing oroduct of the evolved osvches of individual humans living in . . . e groups. Progress in our understanding of culture as a phenomenon depends an progress in uncovering the nature of the evolved mechanisms that comprise the human psyche, including but not limited to those responsible for learning. Actual attempts to specify information processing mechanisms that could, in fact, perform tasks hr~mans routinely perform have demonstrated that the human psyche cannot, even in principle, be eomprised only of a general purpose learning mechanism or any other general purpose mechanism, such as an inclusive kitness maximizer. Instead, the human psyche appears to cansist of a large number ofmechanirms, many or most of which are special purpose and domain-specific. The output of these mechanisms taken together constitutes the "private culture" of each individual, and the interactions of these private cultures lead to the cross-individual patterns of similarity that have led anthropologists to think typologically of social groups as having "a" culture. The construction of a scientific theory of culture requires as its building blocks specific models of these psychological mechanisms, and so evolutionary anthro~olow deoends on the foreine of an evolu. -. . tionary psychology. The most productive application of evolutionary biology is, therefore, in the study of the psychological mechanisms that generate and shave culture. . . rather than in the attempt to impos; on cultural change tooclosea parallel tabopuiatiod genetics and organic evolution.