H. Clark Barrett
UCLA Department of Anthropology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Published in: Evolution and Human Behavior 46 (2025) 106722
Article Type: Commentary
Keywords: Culture, Cultural evolution
The concept of culture has come to play an increasingly important role in evolutionary thinking, typically as an "extra-genetic" mode of inheritance that can shape the development of organisms in concert with genetic mechanisms of development, and that can transmit information from generation to generation. However, as Baumard and André's article shows, the concept of culture in the evolutionary literature is not static (Baumard & André, 2025). Indeed, there is now so much diversity in approaches to culture that it is not clear to what degree they are referring to the same thing.
While they are all naturalistic approaches, taking the word culture to refer to real ("natural," "biological") structures and processes, they all embody different ontological assumptions of what culture is, and how it should be individuated and separated from other phenomena (if at all). Concepts that are definitional in some approaches to culture are contested by others. For example, if "cultural inheritance" is a thing, should it be defined in contrast to "genetic" inheritance? And should what is "transmitted" through culture be conceptualized as "information," as some influential accounts of cultural transmission assert (Boyd & Richerson, 1985)?
Baumard and André's approach to culture rejects several of these traditional concepts as central or necessary for an ontology of culture, including "transmission," "information," and "…the need for a separate system of inheritance or distinct principles. Instead, we argue that the same evolutionary framework that explains biological traits can also account for cultural phenomena effectively and cohesively" (p. 2). Without its own distinct principles, and without framing culture as a distinct inheritance pathway—central reasons for its invocation in evolutionary thinking to date—it seems that Baumard and André's intent is to define away "culture" as a thing at all.
At the same time, the position they take can be defended as a coherent one. Indeed, as approaches to culture in biology have expanded and proliferated in the wake of influential early frameworks (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981; Lumsden & Wilson, 2005; Sperber, 1996), the set of phenomena that "culture" has been used to address has become broader and more inclusive, expanding to include animal culture, niche construction, and processes of ecological / environmental inheritance (Odling-Smee et al., 2013; van Schaik, 2024).
Of all currently extant approaches, Baumard and André's seems to most closely resemble niche construction theory, except for their insistence on inclusive fitness as a central principle (which many advocates of the extended evolutionary synthesis, including some niche construction theorists, reject). What Baumard and André's ecological approach and the niche construction approach have in common is that they are getting closer and closer to a "theory of everything," including all possible processes in the construction of organisms and their environments, and to some degree erasing the barriers between them.
In this sense, it is possible to see ecological inheritance and niche construction theories as inevitable asymptotes of the historical process of including culture in biology. If you expand "culture" to include more and more phenomena, from beaver dams to air pollution, this is where you end up. Not that this is necessarily bad or ontologically incorrect. Indeed, one of the potential pitfalls of a naturalistic approach to culture is that if it turns out that culture is not a natural kind, then whatever a "science of culture" refers to, it is not the science of a phenomenon with natural boundaries or essential properties. The same problem has faced attempts to create scientific approaches to morality, religion, and language—all phenomena which seem real, yet maddeningly hard to define.
The historical process of "culture" evaporating before our eyes or receding into the world around us might be alarming to scholars who see it as their primary object of study. It also potentially threatens approaches to humanness that place our capacity for culture at the center, and the idea of humans as "the cultural species". There is a double-edged problem here: while we might sense viscerally that our capacity for culture makes us who we are, defining the boundaries and nature of culture has proven a nearly impossible task.
Despite its seeming centrality to the field, anthropologists themselves have long challenged the notion of culture as a distinct thing with boundaries and essential properties. Anthropologists have critiqued the idea of culture as transmitted information, the idea that "cultural" elements or features of a society can be partitioned out from non-cultural ones, the idea that culture is carried or stored in people, and the idea that there are group-specific "cultures" that can be individuated, like "American culture" or "Japanese culture" (Abu-Lughod, 2008; Gupta & Ferguson, 1992).
In the historical trajectory of cultural anthropology, theories of culture have become both more expansive and less individuating of culture from other social and physical phenomena. Endpoints of this parallel asymptotic process include actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and the "rhizomatic" approach to culture (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), in which all things are connected, co-constituted, and mutually influencing.
To understand these oddly parallel trajectories and what we should make of them, a historical or genealogical approach to ideas is useful. The concept of "culture" (and its associated English word) has not always meant the same thing, nor, as we have seen, is its meaning stable even now across contexts, communities, and uses. For some English speakers today, "culture" still carries traces of its original European connotations having to with social class, "manners," and "civilization."
When culture was brought into social science—notably, in the influential work of anthropologist Franz Boas—its meaning was intentionally shifted and adjusted (Boas, 1940). This was because the concept was recruited and invoked to do specific explanatory work in Boas' project of constructing a naturalistic science of human affairs—just as the concept is being recruited and invoked in evolutionary science today.
While the scholarly framework in which Boas invoked the notion of culture differed in some ways from contemporary frameworks of evolutionary social science, the reasons for invoking culture as an explanatory concept across these contexts are not all that different. Boas was the founder of American "four-field" anthropology, which carved the discipline into its biological (physical), cultural, linguistic, and archaeological branches. "Culture," in this context, did some heavy conceptual lifting, helping to cleave "cultural" phenomena in human affairs apart from "biological" phenomena. Famously, Boas leaned on this distinction in his characterization of race, and in his explicitly anti-racist project to bring racial phenomena out of biology and into the domain of culture.
The reasons why culture was introduced into evolutionary social science, and the uses to which it is put today, are not that different from the Boasian case. In Sociobiology and later in On Human Nature, E.O. Wilson argued that culture would have to play an important explanatory role in an evolutionary science of human affairs (Wilson, 1975, 1978). It is not an accident that he coauthored one of the first formal "dual inheritance" frameworks invoking genes and culture as separate pathways of inheritance (Lumsden & Wilson, 2005).
At that time it was clear that genes and genetic differences would be insufficient to explain the complexities of human behavior. In addition, the association of evolutionary theorizing with biologically essentialist notions of race and sex drove many evolutionary researchers to seek a scientific framework in which human behavior and individual differences could be grounded in "nurture" rather than, or in addition to, "nature." For explaining human differences, especially ones that seemed to vary systematically across human groups, the concept of culture seemed like a natural solution, just as it had to Boas. And so the naturalistic approach to culture as a complementary system of inheritance was born, grounded in mathematical models derived from population biology that treated culture as inherited "traits" (Boyd & Richerson, 1985).
The founders of this tradition of cultural evolutionary theory were extremely, indeed self-consciously, aware of the drastically simplifying assumptions necessary to build initial models of culture-gene coevolution. However, as is often reiterated in the modeling world, such simplifying assumptions can also be seen as virtues. In fact, the dangers of modeling anything in biology as a set of discrete traits, and/or assuming simple causal pathways between "genes" and "phenotypes," have been well-known to biologists for a long time. Still, simple models are often praised for the transparency of their assumptions and their consequent testability. When models don't match the world, this suggests errors in the underlying assumptions, leading, in principle, to theoretical progress.
This brings us to the question: What do we want from culture? What role do we want it to play in our theories, our research, and our understanding of human affairs? Baumard and André's article draws our attention to two things that seem to point in opposite directions at once. First, rather than undermining or diminishing the role of "culture" in the lives and affairs of humans, other animals, and the earth, it points to the ubiquity of phenomena that we might call "cultural," and their presence in every aspect of life. Second, their approach dissolves the very idea of culture as a distinct thing, domain, or set of processes. Culture is at the same time everything, and nothing. It is in us and the world, but not in a way that is separable or discrete.
If one wants to expand "culture" to include all pathways of mutual influence between organisms, the world, and each other, then this conclusion might seem inevitable. It parallels the causal complexifications of niche construction theory and actor-network theory. Like these theories, the ecological approach to culture need not imply that "everything causes everything," nor that ontological distinctions between entities and processes can't be made. But advocates of more reductionist approaches to culture, such as trait-based gene-culture coevolution modeling, might argue that what the ecological approach to culture gains in explanatory scope and complexity, it loses in testability. As the granularity of the map approaches that of the territory, the increase in degrees of freedom reduces our ability to theorize and understand.
Perhaps that is an unfair categorization. Or perhaps it is true, but also just fine. Cultural anthropologists routinely accept that the complexity of what they seek to understand places strong limits on their ability to make claims, especially testable causal ones. This drives many evolutionary scientists crazy, but it's not wrong.
Time will show whether Baumard and André's ecological framework captures the right granularity to explain human cultural phenomena (if that is, in the end, the right word), and to do work that other theories cannot. Some will argue that making culture recede into the causal fabric of the world goes too far, in that it no longer allows us to theorize culture as a distinct set of processes structuring human affairs. For example, no longer being able to talk about cultural transmission might hobble us unnecessarily. I expect cultural evolution specialists will weigh in on claims that culture has no "distinct principles," that it is not a separate system of inheritance, and so on.
As these debates unfold, it will be useful to see exactly where one framework provides understanding that another cannot. While it is unfashionable to say so in some areas of science, concepts like "culture" and the theories and models in which they are embedded operate as actors in a network of people and things, and they live and die, like everything else, because of those relationships.
Commentary on: Baumard and André, "The ecological approach to culture"
Author Information:
H. Clark Barrett
Corresponding author
E-mail: barrett@anthro.ucla.edu
Article History:
Received 24 June 2025; Accepted 30 June 2025
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