Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2011 Feb 12;366(1563):454-63. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0160.
Incorporating culture into an expanded theory of evolution will provide the foundation for a universal account of human diversity. Two requirements must be met. The first is to see learning as an extension of the processes of evolution. The second is to understand that there are specific components of human culture, viz. higher order knowledge structures and social constructions, which give rise to culture as invented knowledge. These components, which are products of psychological processes and mechanisms, make human culture different from the forms of shared knowledge observed in other species. One serious difficulty for such an expanded theory is that social constructions may not add to the fitness of all humans exposed to them. This may be because human culture has existed for only a relatively short time in evolutionary terms. Or it may be that, as some maintain, adaptation is a limited, even a flawed, aspect of evolutionary theory.
将文化纳入扩展的进化理论将为人类多样性的普遍解释提供基础。必须满足两个要求。第一是将学习视为进化过程的延伸。第二是要理解人类文化有特定的组成部分，即更高阶的知识结构和社会建构，这些构成了发明知识的文化。这些组件是心理过程和机制的产物，使人类文化与其他物种中观察到的共享知识形式不同。这样的扩展理论面临一个严重的困难，即社会建构可能不会增加所有接触到它们的人类的适应性。这可能是因为从进化的角度来看，人类文化只存在了相对较短的时间。或者，正如一些人所主张的，适应是进化理论的一个有限的、甚至有缺陷的方面。
