Dual inheritance theory

Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain human behavior as a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture (DIT suggests) continually interact in a feedback loop: changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual-inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.

'Culture', in this context, is defined as 'socially learned behavior', and 'social learning' is defined as copying behaviors observed in others or acquiring behaviors through being taught by others. Most of the modelling done in the field relies on the first dynamic (copying), though it can be extended to the second (teaching). Social learning, at its simplest, involves blind copying of behaviors from a model (someone observed behaving), though it is also understood to have many potential biases, including success bias (copying from those who are perceived to be better off), status bias (copying from those with higher status), homophily (copying from those most like ourselves), conformist bias (disproportionately picking up behaviors that more people are performing), etc. Understanding that social learning is a system of pattern replication, and understanding that there are different rates of survival for different socially learned cultural variants – this sets up, by definition, an evolutionary structure: cultural evolution.

Because genetic evolution is relatively well-understood, most of DIT examines cultural evolution and the interactions between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.