Cultural Evolution of Altruism — Jonathan Birch / Serious Science

Philosopher Jonathan Birch on memes, cultural evolution and the difference in altruistic behaviour between humans and chimpanzees. Read the full text on our website: ’Cultural evolution is like genetic evolution, and you have processes a bit like natural selection, processes that are a bit Darwinian at work, favouring some variants over others. But the units here are not genes, it’s not genes that are being selected: it’s beliefs, values, sk