I am in full agreement with almost everything Pigliucci says
in the above-linked essay about "human nature." I am concerned, however, about what I see as his opinion that a good
(unified, comprehensive?) theory of cultural evolution may one day be
established.
"...despite much interest and a
number of valiant efforts — we really don’t quite have a good theory of
cultural evolution at hand."
Though he doesn't directly address the reasons for this lack
of a good cultural evolutionary theory, Pigliucci is right about this.
The lack of a "good" cultural evolutionary theory, however, has less to do with our not yet coming up with one than it does with our scientistic expectations. That is, the incorrect belief and
insistence that the patterns and practices of human cultural adaptation, extant
cultural adaptations and all of those throughout history and prehistory, are
reducible to a unified theory containing equations, formulae, and genetic
mapping in a manner similar to what mathematics, physics, chemistry, and
biology apply to other phenomena.
An illustration of only a fraction of the ideas in the
Ethosphere and our commentary on them. This graph represents
co-citation patterns based on all articles published between 1993 and 2013 in
Nous, the Journal of Philosophy, the Philosophical Review, and Mind. Photo Credit:
Philosophy@MHS
Culture and cultural evolution are not fully explained by
the Darwinian-Mendelian theory of biological evolution, or more recent related
efforts called evolutionary psychology and memetics. Worse, the approaches taken and speculations used in most of these two latter-day efforts are misinforming the public.
