Purpose:

To review whether the criticisms commonly made of evolutionary psychology, the four fallacies of pop evolutionary psychology, can be applied to the program of cultural evolution.

Methodological design:

Philosophy’s own method of conceptual analysis and logical consistency of arguments is followed.

Results:

The program called cultural evolution, in the version we reviewed, is a program of pop cultural evolution because it shares the same criticisms made to pop evolutionary psychology.

Research limitations:

Future work should assess whether the criticisms of evolutionary psychology are really correct, and whether these criticisms would affect both pop evolutionary psychology as well as the pop cultural evolution program in the same way.

Findings:

Both pop evolutionary psychology and pop cultural evolution share the following central claims: a) the cognitive, and distinctively human mechanisms that enable the propagation and stability of culture are genetically fixed and inherited; b) the circumstances under which our species evolved provide us with various heuristic ideas for hypothesizing how our minds and bodies function today; and c) the basic components of the mind are evolutionarily ancient.

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