  Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social
scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural
selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any
traits they acquire are regularly discarded at the end of the lifetime of the
individuals that acquired them. While the rationale for framing culture as an
evolutionary process is correct, it does not follow that culture is a Darwinian
or selectionist process, or that population genetics provides viable starting
points for modeling cultural change. This paper lays out step-by-step arguments
as to why a selectionist approach to cultural evolution is inappropriate,
focusing on the lack of randomness, and lack of a self-assembly code. It
summarizes an alternative evolutionary approach to culture: self-other
reorganization via context-driven actualization of potential.
