Although the concept of culture was severely criticized in the second half of the twentieth century, its explanatory use has not been abandoned. Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists have more recently used the concept in models and theories of culture. This use renews the hope that the concept of culture can be explanatorily useful within the social sciences, especially since the new definition of culture connects with both the idea of evolution and with the other natural sciences. In this paper, I analyze the models of cultural evolution developed by Cultural Evolutionary Science (CES), more specifically gene-culture coevolution theoretical models and dual-inheritance theories. I argue that even if CES scholars mostly claim that for them, culture is equal to information, some of these models have aspirations to bring back cultures as discrete units that resemble the social anthropological models of culture that have been already abandoned. I discuss evolutionists’ and social anthropologists’ objections to these models. I claim that despite the popularity of cultural evolutionist theories, social scientists (cultural anthropologists and historians, for example) should remain skeptical about the possibility that this approach can assume an explanatory role for a concept of culture.

中文翻译：

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“文化”的演变：玩杂耍的概念

尽管文化概念在二十世纪下半叶受到严厉批评，但其解释性用途并没有被放弃。进化心理学家和认知科学家最近在文化模型和理论中使用了这一概念。这种用法再次使人们希望文化概念在社会科学中具有解释性的用处，尤其是因为文化的新定义既与进化论又与其他自然科学联系在一起。在本文中，我分析了文化进化科学（CES）开发的文化进化模型，更具体地说，是基因-文化协同进化理论模型和双重继承理论。我认为，即使CES学者大多宣称对他们而言，文化等于信息，这些模型中的一些渴望将文化带回离散的单元，类似于已经被废弃的社会人类学文化模型。我讨论了进化论者和社会人类学家对这些模型的反对。我主张，尽管文化进化论理论广为流行，但社会科学家（例如文化人类学家和历史学家）应该对这种方法能否对文化概念发挥解释性作用持怀疑态度。