Sociological limits and prospects of contemporary cultural evolutionary theory

Abstract

What can sociology learn about the logic of social behaviour from the field of cultural evolution? How can sociology enrich cultural evolutionary theory? In this article, I present and examine cultural evolutionary theory by specifying its various proposed mechanisms, such as cultural drift, biased transmission and cultural selection (including cultural group selection), and by investigating concrete examples of social phenomena to which the theory has been applied. My findings are three-fold. First, cultural evolutionary mechanisms should not be dismissed by sociologists but instead, given their strong explanatory power in certain cases, incorporated into their basic theoretical toolkit. Second, one mechanism, i.e. cultural selection, can even underpin a more nuanced and micro-founded sociological functionalism that avoids some of the errors of structural functionalism. This, however, should not be celebrated too soon as the applicability of cultural selection is more limited than cultural evolutionists acknowledge. Third, drawing on historical sociology and comparative politics I also uncover further important sociological limitations of the cultural evolutionary approach that should be heeded by the latter. I focus on two: (1) its inapplicability to cases of intentional decision-making and strategizing, and (2) its inability to subsume the phenomenon of social power.