Competition between groups can favour culturally transmitted norms that benefit the group even where they cost the individuals who follow them.
The mechanism the genetic version lacks is one that keeps groups internally uniform and mutually different, so that selection has variation between groups to act on. Conformist transmission supplies exactly that, which is why the cultural case survives objections that sink the genetic one. Whether it has actually driven human institutions is the live dispute.
In practice
- An industry in which firms copy the survivors converges on practices that help firms survive, whatever they do for the people inside them.
- A norm costly to every individual who keeps it persists because the groups that dropped it lost.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is variation: conformist learning and punishment of deviants keep groups internally uniform and different from one another, which gives selection between groups something to act on that genetic group selection lacks.
- In its favour
- The mechanism is formally modelled, and ethnographic and archaeological work finds norms spreading by group success, including through imitation of prosperous neighbours.
- Against it
- Biologists widely reject group selection on genes, and critics argue the cultural version still needs migration and conflict rates that are rarely measured, so the models outrun the data.
- Standing
- Contested. Biologists widely reject group selection on genes; the cultural version is more defensible because conformity keeps within-group variation low, and the empirical case is still argued.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change