Introduction to Behavioral

gene-culture coevolution
. This model takes the view that 
these capacities are the product of an evolutionary dynamic involving the interaction 
of genes and culture (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1982). For most of the evolutionary 
history of living species, information has been passed on from one organism to another 
purely by genetic means. The genetic code incorporates instructions for building a 
new organism, and for making decisions based on sensory inputs. Because learning is 
costly and prone to mistakes, it is effi cient for the genome to encode all aspects of the 
environment that are constant or changing only slowly, so that decisions can be easily 
and automatically made in familiar circumstances. When environmental conditions 
vary considerably or change rapidly, organisms need to have more fl exible responses, 
which means they need to be genetically programmed to be able to learn in order 
to deal with less familiar circumstances. In relatively recent times on an evolutionary 
scale, meaning over the last seven million years or so, a different method of information 
transmission has assumed increasing importance, labeled epigenetic. This nongenetic 
mechanism for transferring intergenerational information is cultural in nature. It 
can be vertical (from parents to children), horizontal (peer to peer), oblique (older 
to younger), or can take other directions, such as from higher status to lower status. 
Dawkins (1976) has proposed that the method of transmission of cultural information 
is broadly analogous to that involved with genetic transmission, introducing the term 
‘
meme
’ as a unit of information. Thus memes are replicated from one person to 
another, but imperfectly, in that they mutate, just as in a game of ‘Chinese Whispers’ 
or ‘Telephone’. Furthermore, a process of selection operates so that those memes that 
enhance the fi tness of their carriers tend to survive and be passed on more frequently 
and faithfully. Memes can be as simple as the opening four notes of Beethoven’s 5th 
symphony, or highly complex, like a religious dogma. This large variability in nature 
has led to some criticism of the gene-meme analogy, but, as Gintis (2009) has pointed 
out, modern research has shown that genes also often have ill-defi ned and overlapping 
boundaries.
The interaction of genes and culture has been of vital importance in providing the 
foundation for the rapid evolution of human traits, for example, the development of 
speech and language, and the development of morality and sophisticated social emotions 
such as jealousy, shame, pride, envy, empathy and guilt. The capacities for these traits 
are ultimately determined genetically since they depend on neurological development, 
but their survival value depends on the culture in the relevant environment. 
The importance of this concept of gene-culture coevolution is explored in more 
detail in the next chapter, since it represents a worldview that is not incorporated in all 
the different behavioral sciences. As a result, it has been claimed to be a fundamental 
component of the framework for unifying these sciences (Gintis, 2009), an approach 
sometimes referred to as