• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.173-191
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• 2017

The theories of cultural evolution hold subtly or clearly different stances about definition of culture, pattern of cultural evolution, biases that affect cultural evolution, and relationship between culture and organism. However, the cultural evolution theories have a common problem to solve: As the evolutionary theory of life tries to explain the early steps and the origin of life, the cultural evolution theories also must explain the early steps of the cultural evolution and the role of the human capability that makes cultural evolution possible. Therefore, explanations of the human's unique traits including the cultural ability are related to determine which one is the most plausible among many cultural evolution theories. Theories that tried to explain human uniqueness commonly depict the coevolution of gene (organism) and culture. We will explicitly call the niche construction theory and the dual inheritance theory the 'gene-culture co-evolutionary theory'. In these theories, the most important concept is the 'concept of positive feedback'. In this paper, we distinguish between core positive feedback and marginal positive feedback, according to whether the trait that the concept of positive feedback explains is the trait of human uniqueness. Both types of positive feedback effectively explain the generality of human uniqueness and the diversity of human traits driven by cultural groups. However, this positive feedback requires an end, in contrast to negative feedback which can be continued in order to maintain homeostasis. We argue that the co-evolutionary process in the gene-culture co-evolutionary theories include only the positive feedback, not covering the cultural evolution after the positive feedback. This thesis strives to define the coevolution concept more comprehensively by suggesting the potential relationships between gene and culture after the positive feedback.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.97-110
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• 2012

The sharp decline of fertility in industrialized countries since the 19th century constitutes a major problem for evolutionary approaches to human behavior. Why would people voluntarily reduce their total number of offspring, despite the fact that resources are so abundant in modern times? Here I review three evolutionary hypotheses for low fertility in modern societies, and discuss how the evolutionary perspective could shed new light on solving the problem of low fertility in Korea. Low fertility may be 1) a maladaptive outcome from the mismatch between our ancestral environments and evolutionarily novel environments, 2) a consequence of gene-culture coevolution where traits that reduce genetic fitness can still spread through a population as a result of imitation, especially if the traits are expressed by high-status people, or 3) an adaptation that maximize parents' long-term genetic fitness in knowledge-based industrialized societies where high parental investment is required for rearing competitive offspring. Based on these considerations, I suggest how the evolutionary explanations of low fertility can be applied to increasing the birth rate in Korea.