  Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge
accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural
analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and
drift. It is therefore commonly thought that elements of culture evolve through
natural selection. However, natural selection was proposed to explain how
change accumulates despite lack of inheritance of acquired traits, as occurs
with template-mediated replication. It cannot accommodate a process with
significant retention of acquired or horizontally (e.g. socially) transmitted
traits. Moreover, elements of culture cannot be treated as discrete lineages
because they constantly interact and influence one another. It is proposed that
what evolves through culture is the mind; ideas and artifacts are merely
reflections of its current evolved state. Interacting minds transform (in part)
through through a non-Darwinian autopoietic process similar to that by which
early life evolved, involving not survival of the fittest but actualization of
their potential.
