Nathan Cofnas says: An influential approach in cultural evolutionary theory assumes that beliefs/ideas/practices spread as a result of individuals’ learning biases, natural selection, and random forces. People have learning biases to, for example, conform to the majority or adopt practices that seem useful. Then natural selection favors individuals and groups with adaptive beliefs and practices.
William Durham, Joseph Fracchia, and Richard Lewontin raised the objection that this ignores the role of power in cultural evolution. Maybe cultural evolution is not driven by the aggregate of the individual decisions of agents in a population but by the whim of the powerful. If so, the learning biases that feature in some cultural evolutionary models of the evolution of morality would be largely irrelevant in practice.
Drawing on work by Christopher Boehm, I argued that the evolution of morality probably was driven largely by the exercise of power in ways that undermine cultural evolutionary models that emphasize individual learning biases. Hunter–gatherers in the Pleistocene did not choose what moral rules to follow based on learning biases. Instead, rules were imposed by coalitions of the majority to advance their explicitly represented collective interests. Rule-violators were subject to fitness reducing punishments. This created selection pressures to internalize group norms and, I argue, to be innately receptive to certain rules that were widely enforced across groups.
This is not to deny that we have the learning biases identified by cultural evolutionary theorists. We really are disposed to, for example, conform to the majority and copy prestigious individuals. But these are not always decisive forces in cultural evolution. In regard to morality, the ultimate source of many of our moral values are powerful individuals and coalitions who managed to enforce values that serve their interests. Once a norm becomes culturally entrenched, people conform to it without being aware of its origin. The idea that power influences morality in this way might seem like common sense to many people, but it hasn’t been incorporated into mainstream cultural evolutionary theory because it doesn’t fit with the standard models.
