Читать книгу Mechanisms of cultural evolution - Victor Efremenko - Страница 12

The prerequisites for the evolution of living nature are as follows:

1. Variability of objects of living nature. Descendants are not clones of the parents and are always different from them in some aspects.

2. Selection. Living objects, being in populations, are forced to fight for limited food resources. Therefore, inevitably there is a struggle with others like themselves or with environmental conditions for vital resources, i.e. the possibility of existence and reproduction. Charles Darwin called these processes natural selection.

3. Inheritance. Those individuals that, by their innate qualities, will be most adapted (adapted) to the conditions of existence, have more chances to survive and reproduce. These qualities in biological evolution are provided by the mechanisms of inheritance.

Charles Darwin established the first two conditions, but he knew nothing about the mechanisms of inheritance. The mechanisms of inheritance were investigated later.

If at least one of these conditions is not met, for some objects, then they do not evolve. Throughout biological evolution, the first and third conditions are met due to the presence of genes in cells, which play a key role in the mechanisms of inheritance.

Genes ensure the inheritance of only innate properties, and not acquired during life.

This is one of the cornerstones of population genetics.

Human cultural evolution has been observed throughout the entire historical period. Its manifestation consists in the accumulation of cultural achievements (adaptations) by humanity, achievements not innate, but acquired. This raises questions about how cultural adaptations arise and where they accumulate and what are the mechanisms of their inheritance. After all, cultural evolution is an observable fact. What plays the role of replicators (from the Latin replicatio, renewal, repetition) in cultural evolution instead of genes?