Philosophy Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2012 Aug 5;367(1599):2160-70. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0118.
Evolutionary models of cultural change have acquired an important role in attempts to explain the course of human evolution, especially our specialization in knowledge-gathering and intelligent control of environments. In both biological and cultural change, different patterns of explanation become relevant at different 'grains' of analysis and in contexts associated with different explanatory targets. Existing treatments of the evolutionary approach to culture, both positive and negative, underestimate the importance of these distinctions. Close attention to grain of analysis motivates distinctions between three possible modes of cultural evolution, each associated with different empirical assumptions and explanatory roles.
文化变迁的进化模型在解释人类进化的历程方面具有重要作用，特别是在解释我们对知识的收集和对环境的智能控制的专业化方面。在生物和文化变迁中，不同的解释模式在不同的分析层面和与不同的解释目标相关的背景下变得相关。现有的对文化进化的进化方法的处理，无论是正面的还是负面的，都低估了这些区别的重要性。对分析粒度的密切关注促使我们区分文化进化的三种可能模式，每种模式都与不同的经验假设和解释角色相关联。
