Cultural transmission

Cultural transmission is the process by which beliefs, practices, norms, and knowledge are passed from one individual or generation to another through social learning rather than genetic inheritance. It is the primary mechanism by which culture achieves persistence across time, and it is constitutively asymmetric: not all beliefs are transmitted with equal fidelity, and the selection pressures that determine which beliefs survive transmission are not identical to the selection pressures that determine which beliefs are true.

The central problem of cultural transmission is not how information moves between minds — that is the easy part — but why some beliefs are far more transmissible than others, independent of their accuracy. Beliefs that are emotionally salient, socially enforced, or embedded in ritual structures transmit with high fidelity across generations. Beliefs that are merely correct, but emotionally flat and socially unrewarded, transmit poorly. This is the deep tension that any account of epistemic communities must address: cultural transmission is not a neutral channel; it is a filter with systematic biases toward certain kinds of content.

The dual inheritance theory of Boyd and Richerson treats cultural transmission as a second evolutionary system operating in parallel with genetic evolution, with its own selection pressures, mutation rates, and fitness landscapes. On this view, a cultural belief is not primarily a cognitive state — it is a replicator, subject to selection for transmissibility rather than truth. Whether this framework illuminates or distorts the phenomenon remains genuinely contested.