Frozen Evolution. Or, that’s not the way it is, Mr. Darwin. A Farewell to Selfish Gene.

Adaptive characteristics including patterns of behavior that we encounter in organisms mostly emerged as evolutionary adaptations or exaptations through the action of natural selection during biological evolution.However, animals have a number of properties, especially patterns of behavior, that are useful and nonetheless are not formed by biological evolution, but rather by cultural evolution.J.M. Baldwin (Baldwin 1896)was apparently one of the first to describe social heritability of behavior and thus the basic principle of cultural evolution.The best known traits falling in this category include bird songs and various hunting habits and skills of predators.It is obvious that the genetic predisposition of the members of the particular species plays a greater or lesser role in most of these traits.However, the specific form of the trait is perfected by cultural evolution.While patterns of behavior formed by biological evolution are transmitted genetically in the population, traits formed by cultural evolution are transmitted by learning, especially one of its forms – imitation.

The basic criterion that allows us to decide whether certain behavior is a product of biological evolution or of cultural evolution consists in the result of an isolation experiment.In an isolation experiment, a sufficiently hard-hearted experimenter isolates the young from adult individuals as soon as possible after their birth and monitors which patterns of behavior develop in them and which do not.Then he quietly hopes, in the worse case even expects, that only an unsubstantial part of the observed differences in the behavior of the animals is a result of their social deprivation or some other undesirable, although highly probable experimental artifact.If it is not possible to perform an isolation experiment, for example when studying the behavior of humans, a comparative study can be performed, for example with identical twins brought up by different parents (Fig. XVII.1).However, comparative studies will tend to over-evaluate the role of heredity.It is quite possible that the families that each adopts one of a pair of siblings will be similar in some way, so that the siblings will be exposed to relatively similar environments.s