Cultural Network Structure

How did our society decide how much to count things like education and artistic taste when evaluating prestige and status? How did we pick key moral norms and values, such as democracy, gender equality, legal due process, rules of just war, and norms of good parenting? Yes, such choices are weakly influenced by our DNA, and also by cultural evolution selection pressures on individuals. But mostly these things came from cultural evolution of groups.You may have heard that such *group selection* never happens, but that’s wrong. Not only do most cultural evolution scholars see group selection as a key force, group selection also seems to important in DNA evolution, where species are groups. The fact that more species today descended from fragmented habits like rivers, coral reefs, and rainforests, where habitats were smaller, suggests that group selection of species has actually mattered more for DNA than individual selection within species.I’ve said previously that healthy cultural…