Heritable Variation and Competitive Selection as the Mechanism of Sociocultural Evolution

This chapter examines how heritable variation and competitive selection promote sociocultural evolution, based on the application of Charles Darwin's ‘descent with modification’ to human behaviour. It first considers the extent to which sociocultural selection can be reduced to natural selection before explaining how cultural and natural selection, despite being different evolutionary forces, act simultaneously on human populations and their social behaviour. It then cites the practice of venality in France between 1467 and 1789 as a clear case of replication through social rather than cultural selection.