Reconciling Our Three Traditions: Human Behavioral Ecology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Cultural Evolution
– by Nicolas Baumard & Jean-Baptiste André
The evolutionary social sciences are grounded in the idea that evolutionary theory provides a unified framework to explain human behavior, including social norms, institutions, and cultural practices. Historically, the field emerged from the inclusive fitness revolution of the 1960s and developed into a powerful toolkit for analyzing strategic behavior. Yet over time, it has fractured into three dominant traditions—Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE), Evolutionary Psychology (EP), and Cultural Evolution (CE)—that often find themselves in tension, especially when addressing cultural phenomena.
In this article, we propose an ecological approach to culture that aims to reconcile these three traditions. Our proposal draws on their most robust insights while correcting the limitations that have led to fragmentation.
From Evolutionary Psychology, we adopt the foundational idea that humans are equipped with evolved cognitive mechanisms oriented toward adaptive goals such as survival, reproduction, social status, or cooperation. However, unlike traditional EP which emphasizes the universality and domain-specificity of these mechanisms, we emphasize their plasticity and generative nature. These mechanisms are not rigid modules but adaptive systems capable of producing flexible, context-sensitive responses—including entirely novel behaviors, institutions, and cultural artifacts—based on environmental inputs.
From Human Behavioral Ecology, we adopt the insight that adaptive strategies depend on context. Humans do not pursue fitness in a vacuum; they do so under particular ecological constraints and opportunities. As such, behavior cannot be understood apart from the ecology—broadly defined to include social, economic, and informational environments—that individuals inhabit.
From Cultural Evolution, we recognize that the human environment is not only natural, but also cultural—shaped by the accumulated actions of previous generations. Humans learn many of our behaviors by watching how others do things, whether how to forage, what tools to use, or how to achieve social status, i.e., we learn culturally. These are not “transmitted” in a genetic or replicative sense, but rather function as ecological legacies — modifications of the environment that constrain and enable future behavior, much like the trails left by elephants or the structures built by beavers shape the conditions of life for subsequent individuals. Individuals choose to adopt, build on, or ignore these cultural legacies based on the payoffs for doing so, including the social payoffs.
This perspective leads us to a key divergence from standard Cultural Evolution Theory: we see no need to posit a distinct inheritance system or an analogue of natural selection operating at the cultural level. Cultural change, in our view, does not depend on the replication and differential survival of cultural variants, but on how individuals, equipped with evolved psychological mechanisms, reuse and recombine the available cultural elements in ways that serve their current goals within a given ecology.
To take a specific image, we propose thinking of cultures as akin to forests (hence the picture!). A forest is the emergent product of countless interactions between organisms, their environment, and the phenotypic structures they (and their predecessors) build to pursue adaptive goals: trees anchoring themselves in the soil, fungi forming symbiotic networks, animals digging burrows or using tree canopies for shelter, and so forth. Like cultures, forests persist across generations and precede the individuals living in them. They constrain and enable individual actions; vary in form and structure depending on local conditions; they exhibit historical contingency and path-dependence; result from myriad individual decisions without being reducible to any one of them; display emergent integration and functional organization; and accumulate structural and organic matter over time, which further shapes the environment and the behavior of future generations.
Yet in ecology, a forest is not treated as the output of a second inheritance system or as a group-level adaptation. Rather, it is seen as the aggregate result of individual organisms pursuing their adaptive goals—organisms whose actions transform the environment for others. This altered environment, in turn, constrains and enables new strategies in a continuous feedback loop. Likewise, cultural phenomena such as religious traditions, legal systems, or market economies may appear as autonomous forces acting on individuals. But in reality, they are the ecological residue of strategic behaviors shaped by individual adaptive goals in specific historical environments. Culture is not a transmitted substance; it is the structured context that emerges from repeated and overlapping individual actions.
This ecological approach allows us to make sense of both continuity and radical change in cultural forms. The same religious tradition, artistic style, or social institution can take on very different functions and meanings across time, not because it is faithfully transmitted, but because it is continually repurposed by individuals making strategic use of new ecological conditions. What we observe as “cultural continuity” often masks deep underlying plasticity and strategic adaptation.
By focusing on proximate cognitive mechanisms and the dynamic feedback loops between individuals and their modified environments, the ecological approach to culture offers a unified framework capable of integrating the strategic reasoning of HBE, the psychological realism of EP, and the cultural legacy emphasis of CE—while avoiding the problematic assumption of cultural replication. Culture, we argue, is not a second system of inheritance; it is the ecological residue of cumulative behavior from previous generations, to which our evolved minds respond with flexible, adaptive strategies.
In placing human agents—and their evolved interests—at the heart of cultural dynamics, the ecological approach to culture not only bridges the gap between behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural evolution; it also reclaims the original power of inclusive fitness theory that grounded the evolutionary study of behavior. The strength of inclusive fitness lies in its parsimony and constraint: it limits what evolution can plausibly produce and thereby yields genuine explanatory and predictive power. It treats cultural behaviors as ecological phenomena, shaped by the adaptive strategies of individuals operating in environments that include the material and informational legacies of the past. This perspective brings culture back under the umbrella of adaptationist reasoning, restoring the predictive power of evolutionary theory. It allows us to understand why some traditions persist while others vanish, why cultural change can be both rapid and conservative, and why individuals sometimes embrace cultural inputs and sometimes discard them. In doing so, it reaffirms that cultural behavior, no less than any other aspect of behavior, can be explained—not just described—by evolutionary principles, constrained by the logic of inclusive fitness.
Read the original paper (here): Baumard, N., & Jean-Baptiste André, J.-B. (2025). The ecological approach to culture. Evolution & Human Behavior, 46(3), 106686.
