How a Generation Was Misled About Natural Selection (Natural Selection: How it Works, How it Applies to Culture)
Liane M. Gabora · 2022
Building on von Neumann's pioneering insights about self-replicating automata, John Holland identified three requirements for natural selection: (1) sequestration of inherited information, (2) a clear-cut distinction between genotype and phenotype, and as a consequence of 1 and 2, (3) no transmission of acquired traits. This paper explains why Dawkins’ characterization of natural selection in terms of replicators with longevity, fedundity and fidelity was simpler, and caught the public imagination, but it threw the baby out with the bathwater. It led to cultural evolution being misleading described as a Darwinian process despite that it lacks the requisite deep structure for such a process, and lacks signature characteristic of evolution by natural selection: no transmission of acquired traits. This paper suggests that culture evolves through a more haphazard process akin to the process by which the earliest protocells evolved, a process that does not involve a self-assembly code yet is sufficient for cumulative, adaptive, open-ended change.