Can Cultural Evolution Accommodate Power? Race, Gender, and Lewontin's Critique

Lewontin’s well-known critique of cultural evolution charges evolutionary approaches to culture with the inability to take power into account, stemming from ontological and methodological commitments to individualism. This chapter argues that individualist cultural evolutionary approaches struggle to accommodate the social structures of race and gender, further supporting Lewontin’s critique. However, recent cultural evolutionary work has produced compelling analyses of the emergence and stability of racial and gender hierarchies. In these analyses, power differentials emerge from individual-level interactions. The success of this line of research appears to cast doubt on Lewontin’s critique. This chapter argues that this weakens Lewontin’s critique to some extent, although it remains powerful in its appraisal of certain forms of cultural evolutionary work, and in its reminder that social power relations are central to the project of understanding culture. Based on this analysis, the chapter suggests ways in which work in social ontology could fruitfully inform cultural evolutionary research, and vice versa.