Mother Culture, Meet Mother Nature

Research on the adaptive characteristics of the human immune system reveals that evolutionary algorithms are not strictly matters of replication. And research in genomics suggests that there is no a single source of evolutionary information that carries the same content in every environment. A plausible theory of cultural evolution must acknowledge the possibility that multiple selective algorithms are operating at different time-scales, on different units of selection, with different logical structures; but it must explain how different selective processes are interfaced to yield culturally stable phenomena. This paper advances an empirically plausible approach to memetics that recognizes a wider variety of evolutionary algorithms; and it advances a pluralistic approach to cultural change. Finally, it shows that multiple forms of processing, operating at different timescales, on different units of selection, collectively sustain the human capacity to form and use certain types of representations.