Human communication as niche construction

Cultural transmission is essentially the idea that beliefs and values are passed from generation to generation. The question I would like to address in this paper is how does this happen? In particular, what is the mechanism? In the absence of a deep understanding of the process by which people come to have similar ideas, a variety of metaphors have been used. The purpose of this paper is to outline the options for understanding cultural transmission as a process and to analyse their consistency with what we know about cultural change and communication more generally. I conclude with a view which I hope is an advance over the existing alternatives. My proposal makes clearer the role of artefacts in mediating many kinds of communication, and takes account of the recent evolution of evolutionary technology – networks of machines which exhibit the qualities of information inheritance, selection and mutation – as an important phenomenon that interacts with cultural change.