Cultural Evolution Theory Is Not a Bridge but a Social Science, Philosopher Argues

Cultural Evolution Theory, the interdisciplinary framework that applies evolutionary models to human culture, has long presented itself as a bridge spanning the divide between the natural sciences and the social sciences. A new open access paper published in the journal Ethics and Society on 12 September 2026 argues that this self-image is misleading. Daniel Frank, the paper’s author, contends that Cultural Evolution Theory is not a bridge to the social sciences at all, but at least in some respects a social science itself, and that its commitment to naturalism sits uneasily with its own claims about what it does.

The paper traces the long and troubled history of attempts to bring Darwinian thinking to bear on human culture. Since the nineteenth century, numerous approaches have tried to determine the relationship between Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and humans as cultural beings. Darwin himself was extremely cautious about what his theory might mean for human societies, but through the writings of Herbert Spencer his ideas were soon interpreted politically and later misused to justify laissez-faire capitalism and draw normative conclusions. Frank notes that these efforts have repeatedly left scorched earth behind them.

The best-known twentieth-century attempts, memetics and sociobiology, both drew heavy criticism. Richard Dawkins proposed memes as the elementary units of cultural transmission, analogous to genes, assuming a structural neutrality of the selection principle and speculating about a transmission mechanism on the cultural level that mirrors genetics. Critics pointed out that, unlike genes, memes are neither comparably discrete units nor do they match genes in copying accuracy, and the distinction between genotype and phenotype is not straightforward to apply to them. Memetics failed to provide empirical testability, while sociobiology was accused of resting on genetic determinism and lacking evidence for the genetic basis and heritability of social traits. Paul Thompson later relativized this fundamental critique, honouring sociobiology’s explanatory power in the study of social insects while agreeing that it does not apply adequately to complex human behaviour, because no theory links the genetic level to the behavioural level.

Contemporary Cultural Evolution Theory emerged in the late twentieth century and is often organised around two schools. The California school, developed from the work of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman, uses models from population genetics to explain the diffusion of cultural variants. The Paris school, introduced by Dan Sperber, denies that cultural change is driven by replication and instead relies on epidemiological models, sometimes called cultural attractor theory. A further root is dual inheritance theory, developed in the 1980s by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd. Researchers such as Kevin Laland, Andrew Whiten, Alex Mesoudi and Joseph Henrich have driven the field forward. A widely shared assumption is that the same tools, methods and approaches used to study biological evolution may be productively applied to human culture, and that a science of cultural evolution should broadly resemble the structure of evolutionary biology. Yet fundamental differences remain: selection is elementary to the California school, while it plays only a minor role in the Paris school’s cultural attractor theory.

A central innovation of the field is gene-culture co-evolution, which no longer assumes that genetic endowment determines cultural behaviour. Instead, a feedback effect of cultural developments on genetic evolution is assumed. Sedentism and the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry are thought to have significantly influenced the evolution of different genes, with the gene encoding the enzyme lactase serving as a standard example. Humans modify their environment in ways that may change selection pressure on genes, a process known as niche construction. Beyond co-evolution, the field also studies the spread of cultural variants such as artefacts or behaviours for which no genetic disposition is assumed. Here the mathematical models developed in population genetics to study gene transmission are applied to cultural traits, with patterns of cultural transmission, innovation, random fluctuations and selection treated as conceptually analogous to genetic processes. The field also draws on findings from psychology concerning cognitive biases in social learning, such as conformist bias, the tendency to adopt traits predominant in a group, and prestige bias, the tendency to learn from highly reputable individuals.

Frank’s central analytical move is to dissect what kind of naturalism underlies these approaches. He distinguishes ontological naturalism, which denies supernatural entities and holds that culture is part of biology; analytic naturalism, which seeks to reduce intentional and evaluative vocabulary to natural terms; and methodological naturalism, which holds that the methods of the natural sciences are the superior, or even the only reliable, way of gaining knowledge. He argues that methodological naturalism is clearly at the core of Cultural Evolution Theory. Acerbi and Mesoudi describe the field as aiming to provide a naturalistic and quantitative explanation of culture, and Sperber conceives his approach as a science that makes non-naturalistic approaches in the social sciences obsolete because it provides better explanations. Frank suggests such aspirations fall under what philosopher John Dupré calls scientific imperialism, the tendency to push a good scientific idea far beyond the domain in which it can provide much illumination, which in the end can lead to an intellectual disorder.

The paper then examines what kind of unification the field actually pursues. E.O. Wilson’s vision of consilience, in which the explanatory network of the natural sciences touches the edge of culture itself, combines reductive and expansive strategies. Catherine Driscoll offers a different account, describing cultural evolution science as a bridge field that fills the gap between evolutionary biology and the social sciences, answering questions about the origin of the capacities for culture and social learning that fall between the two. Frank finds Driscoll’s proposal plausible but too unspecific: the field remains a loose collection of interests, problems, analogies and models rather than a unified theory. The question of how cultural traits increase the fitness of their possessors is basically a question of evolutionary biology, while the question of how cultural variants spread within human cultures has been within the scope of the social sciences for a long time. As long as the field is committed to taking people seriously as acting individuals and does not naturalise intentionality, a unified naturalistic theory of cultural evolution remains unattainable, he argues.

As an alternative, Frank proposes a Neurathian conception of unification, drawing on Otto Neurath of the Vienna Circle. Neurath’s physicalism did not claim that all sciences could be reduced to physics; his unity of science was a unity of coordinated action rather than of theory, an encyclopaedic assemblage of knowledge in which disciplines continue to exist side by side. Philosopher Angela Potochnik summarises this stance as coordination among fields in the face of causal complexity, rather than reductive unity. On this reading, Cultural Evolution Theory is unified neither because it reduces social science to biology nor because it constitutes a genuinely new bridge science, but because it coordinates explanatory resources from several disciplines around shared empirical problems. Frank argues that the quest for a bridge between the natural and social sciences is reasonable for the purpose of intensive cooperation, but not in the sense of an ontological or methodological naturalization.

The paper’s most provocative thesis is that the theory belongs within the social sciences. Frank observes that conflicts similar to those between natural and social sciences are currently being conducted within the social sciences themselves, between individualists and holists, and between microfoundationalists and macrofoundationalists. Population thinking, a theoretical core of dual inheritance theory, explains the spread of beliefs and cultural variants at the macro level, much like the population ecology approach to organisations in sociology. At the same time, the field insists on the individual level, grounding population patterns in mechanisms of social learning and cognitive biases. Frank cites Henrich and Henrich’s study of a food taboo on the Fiji Islands, where pregnant and lactating women avoid marine species toxic to the foetus or nursing infant, and where nearly all women reported learning the rule through social transmission, most from mothers, grandmothers or mothers-in-law, with others learning from respected wise women or elders. Such explanations, he argues, are both functional and individual, and are recognised forms of naturalistic social science.

Frank concludes that Cultural Evolution Theory occupies a niche within the naturalistic social sciences rather than forming a third party between the natural sciences and the social sciences. Hermeneutically oriented social sciences, which treat human beings as self-interpreting beings rather than natural objects, are hardly threatened by it, though a lively exchange between the two remains desirable. His recommendation is that the field should cancel its commitment to naturalism, because that commitment is inconsistent with its claim neither to eliminate social phenomena nor to explain them reductively. Unification should be sought on the practical level, through problem-oriented collaboration, rather than on the ontological, methodological or theoretical level. In this sense, the theory has the potential to provide new impulses for the social sciences, not as a discipline arriving from outside to naturalize them, but as a modelling approach within the social sciences themselves. The real gap, Frank suggests, exists not so much between the social sciences and the natural sciences, but between naturalists and non-naturalists.

Subject of Research: The naturalistic commitments and unification claims of Cultural Evolution Theory and its relationship to the social sciences

Article Title: Cultural Evolution Theory – Bridging Which Gap?

Article References: Frank, D. (2026). Cultural Evolution Theory – Bridging Which Gap?. Ethics and Society, 20(3), Article 31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-026-00524-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11569-026-00524-0

Keywords: cultural evolution theory, gene-culture coevolution, naturalism, unity of science, social sciences, memetics, sociobiology, dual inheritance theory, population thinking, scientific imperialism, Otto Neurath, philosophy of science