The Cultural Evolution Society is a professional scientific society that advances the theory and practice of cultural evolutionary studies. Our goal is to build capacity for researchers, educators, and practitioners to coordinate efforts.

Our capacity for culture stems from our ability to receive, process, integrate, and transmit information across generations. The study of human culture and cultural change has made great strides during the last few decades in fields such as anthropology, computer science, evolutionary biology, neurobiology, psychology, and sociology. A great deal of progress has been made in parallel with the study of animal behavior in primate studies, ethology more broadly, and the various ecological sciences. Yet, the study of cultural change as an evolutionary process, similar to genetic evolution but with its own inheritance mechanisms, is only now becoming a central area of scientific inquiry that spans these disciplines and holds much potential for academic integration.

Outside the Ivory Tower, all public policies attempt to accomplish cultural change in a practical sense to reach their various objectives, yet they rarely draw upon an explicit scientific theory of cultural change. A new society is needed to catalyze the study of cultural change from a modern evolutionary perspective, both inside and outside the Ivory Tower.

A 2015 Evolution Institute workshop, “Advancing the Study of Cultural Evolution: Academic Integration and Policy Applications,” laid the groundwork for the formation of this society. The workshop was organized by Michele Gelfand, a cultural psychologist at the University of Maryland, and the biologist David Sloan Wilson.

The participants represented a melting pot of disciplines that need to become integrated to create a science of cultural change informed by evolutionary theory. They strongly endorsed the need for a society to accomplish the objectives identified during the workshop.