Vad är en idealistisk historiesyn?

As Tooby and Cosmides (1992) have proposed, from an evolutionary perspective, there are two known processes that offer a naturalistic account of how culture emerges: (a) Culture can be evoked by local environmental triggers acting on the same underlying psychology (evoked culture); (b) culture can travel from mind to mind by processes of transmission, analogous, but not identical, to Darwinian genetic evolution (transmitted or epidemiological culture, e.g., Sperber, 1996). To illustrate how evoked culture operates, Tooby and Cosmides discussed how the same food-sharing mechanism can lead to different cultural norms depending on the degree of variability in foraging success. Egalitarian norms for food sharing and sanctions against hoarding are strong where foraging or hunting success is highly variable across time, but not when the supply of food is relatively stable. In their article, Gangestad et al. (this issue) admirably elaborate on the notion of evoked culture to explain cultural variation in mate preferences. In this case, the authors argue that the same underlying mate preference for indicators of health interacts with an ecological cue to produce cultural variation—where parasite prevalence is high, features signaling health are more important and diagnostic of underlying health, and as a result attractive mates are preferred more strongly than in regions with low parasite prevalence. Transmitted or epidemiological culture, in contrast, is prototypically what most social scientists consider culture (Nisbett, 2003; Richerson & Boyd, 2005; Sperber 1996). This refers to the fact that genetically similar people living in similar environments may possess strikingly different beliefs and practices that they acquire from others in their group. Culture emerges when information is transmitted not genetically but socially through social learning mechanisms such as mimicry, imitation, and instruction (Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993), as well as a byproduct of communicative processes such as gossip, conversations,and telling of stories (Schaller, 2001). With significant assistance from other human beings, people acquire and transmit substantial amounts of information that subsequently alters their behavior in profound ways.