Department of Philosophy, Central European University, 1100 Vienna, Austria.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2021 Jul 5;376(1828):20200042. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0042. Epub 2021 May 17.
Theories of cultural evolution rest on the assumption that cultural inheritance is distinct from biological inheritance. Cultural and biological inheritance are two separate so-called channels of inheritance, two sub-systems of the sum total of developmental resources travelling in distinct ways between individual agents. This paper asks: In reply, a philosophical account is offered that points at three related but distinct criteria that (taken together) make the distinction between cultural and biological inheritance not only precise but also justify it as real, i.e. as ontologically adequate. These three criteria are (i) the autonomy of cultural change, (ii) the near-decomposability of culture and (iii) differences in temporal order between cultural and biological inheritance. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.
文化进化理论基于这样一个假设，即文化传承有别于生物遗传。文化传承和生物遗传是两种不同的所谓传承渠道，是在个体之间以不同方式传播的发展资源总和的两个子系统。本文提出：在回应中，提供了一种哲学解释，指出了三个相关但不同的标准，（综合起来）不仅使文化和生物传承之间的区别变得精确，而且证明了这种区别是真实的，即具有本体论上的充分性。这三个标准是：(i) 文化变迁的自主性；(ii) 文化的近可分解性；以及 (iii) 文化传承和生物传承之间的时间顺序差异。本文是“文化进化基础”主题特刊的一部分。
