Human Culture and Cognition

Human behaviour is largely influenced by culture. Culture evolves cumulatively over time. The origins of culture in our lineage necessitated the evolution of psychological biases so humans could tractably navigate the emerging information environment. I examine the nature of these biases and conclude that they are unlikely to be genetically coded to any significant degree. This is because of the flexibility such biases needed to possess in the face of fluid cultural environments and because of the developmental mechanisms of the brain. I further outline three possible views on what the nature of the information these biases act upon might be. First there is the view that cultural information is constructed and held in individual minds but does not flow in any meaningful replicative fashion between minds. Second is the view that culture is information distributed in a population and cultural evolution is the temporal change of this populationlevel information as a result of low fidelity individual copying events. Finally, I argue that meme theory, which asserts that culture is usefully seen as bits of information that replicate in transmission, is a fruitful model of cultural evolution. Keywords Cognition, cultural evolution, culture, evolutionary psychology, memes, neuroconstructivism, psychological biases.