Cultural evolutionists have an ambitious agenda. They seek to explain population-level changes in socially learned characteristics using resources from evolutionary biology. The characteristics range from stone tool-use and marriage customs to fairy stories and social media outrage. The resources include modelling techniques from population genetics and assumptions about the innate structure of minds. Starting in the late 1970s, the dominant school of cultural evolution, known as ‘dual inheritance theory’ and the ‘California school’, has argued that individual humans are not especially smart.
