The case for applying Darwinian principles to explain social and cultural change

John Schooneveldt (Nature and Society Forum)

Traditional wisdom has long recognised that societal arrangements, beliefs, languages and cultures evolve over time but they do so rather differently to the way living organisms have evolved. In other words, while Darwinian evolution is widely accepted as explaining the evolution of our physical selves, including our brains, our minds seem to change in rather more mysterious ways.

In this Forum I argue against this dualism by going back to Darwin’s original work and earlier Greek ideas of causation to explore the possibility that contextually generated selection pressures not only offer an elegant explanation of biological evolution but the evolution and development of mind, culture, language etc as well.