A reduction in the quantity of variety is the process of selection: some of the possibilities or alternatives are eliminated, others are retained. The result is a constraint: a limitation of the number of possibilities.

Natural selection is the process through which populations of living organisms adapt and change. Individuals in a population are naturally variable, meaning that they are all different in some ways. This variation means that some individuals have traits better suited to the environment than others. Individuals with adaptive traits—traits that give them some advantage—are more likely to survive and reproduce. These individuals then pass the adaptive traits on to their offspring. Over time, these advantageous traits become more common in the population. Through this process of natural selection, favorable traits are transmitted through generations.

Natural selection can lead to speciation, where one species gives rise to a new and distinctly different species. It is one of the processes that drives evolution and helps to explain the diversity of life on Earth.

Darwin chose the name natural selection to contrast with “artificial selection,” or selective breeding that is controlled by humans. He pointed to the pastime of pigeon breeding, a popular hobby in his day, as an example of artificial selection. By choosing which pigeons mated with others, hobbyists created distinct pigeon breeds, with fancy feathers or acrobatic flight, that were different from wild pigeons.

Group selection

Differential survival and reproduction of groups within a population. Dysfunctional (nonadapted) groups become extinct and are replaced by relatively successful (well-adapted) groups. Here adaptation is to a given environment in which the population resides. Such a group evolution process requires a diversity of groups, in terms of composition of individuals, genes or strategies or institutions.

Cultural selection theory studies cultural changes by modelling them after theories of biological evolution. Three prominent approaches to cultural selection are social contagion theory, evolutionary epistemology, and memetics. Social contagion theory’s epidemiological approach construes social entities as analogous to parasites that are transmitted virally through a population of biological organisms. Evolutionary epistemology’s focus lies in causally connecting evolutionary biology and rationality by generating explanations for why traits for rational behaviour or thought patterns would have been selected for in a species’ evolutionary history. Memetics models cultural change after population genetics, taking cultural units to be analogous to genes.

This essay is concerned with systems of cultural evolution that are unambiguously non-strategic: that is, the mechanisms underlying the systems of interest are not forward-thinking or rational in any sense, but rather result from blind variation and selective retention of characteristics resulting from environmental interaction. Some theorists contend that even quintessentially strategic, forward-thinking, rational processes are essentially the product of non-strategic, Darwinian selection. For example, some of Popper’s ([1972]) work in the philosophy of science and Campbell’s ([1974]) evolutionary epistemology can be interpreted as supporting this view. This essay, however, is not concerned with such processes.

Comment: However, others have written about the intentional, strategic, forward-thinking rational capabilities of humans to intentionally select aspects of cultural.

Principle 1: People are culturally shaped shapers, so they can be culture changers. • Since people and their cultures make each other up: (a) culture change involves changing both people and their social environments and (b) cultures are not neutral because they have human-made assump- tions built into their designs.

The first principle is both conceptually and procedurally the “first principle” of intentional culture change. It is important to recognize that the cultures, institutions, and organizations that structure society are not abstractions or superordinate entities that exist out there in the world on their own. They are made up by people, for people. So, people can change them. People are culturally shaped shapers: They both shape and are shaped by the cultural contexts they inhabit through an ongoing process called “mutual constitution” (Adams & Markus, 2004; A. P. Fiske et al., 1998; Markus & Hamedani, 2019; Shweder, 1991). People and their cultures make each other up. Humans are not only Homo sapiens, those who make sense or meaning, but also Homo faber, those who make or create.

One of social psychology’s key concepts is that the mind and the social context—the person and the situation— depend upon and co-construct one another (Cohen, 2022; Lewin, 1946/1951; Ross & Nisbett, 1991/2011). Since the person is always in context, changing how people think and what they do requires changing the world around them; through the interactions they have; the practices, norms, and policies they follow; and the narratives they use to make sense of their experiences. People and their cultures are necessarily and interdependently linked ...

... People participate in cultures simultaneously as both social constructions and social constructors of experience (Markus et al., 1996). While they may embody, uphold, and perpetuate some aspects of culture, they may simultaneously ignore, resist, or reject others. Both processes are parts of culture. While differences in any one person’s power, resources, and status can affect how much influence they exert, people collectively can either perpetuate cultures or resist them. The key lesson here is that since people are culturally shaped shapers, they can also be culture changers.

Take the U.S. American child above. As they grow up in the United States, they will be exposed to a variety of narratives about American identity and diversity though the people, products, organizations, and institutions with whom they interact, some more mainstream and others idiosyn- cratic. As such, the child’s version of what it means to be American will be influenced by their race or ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, political affiliation, education, social class, religion, and more. They may largely embrace the version of what it means to be American to which they were exposed, or they may be critical of it and seek to contest or reject elements of it. They may become a politician, nurse, barista, engineer, musician, or construction worker, and in any of these roles, fight to uphold, reform, or challenge the societal narratives, policies, norms, and practices of American culture that come into play in their life. They could be a survivor or lawyer fighting for gun control versus gun rights policies or a parent or teacher advocating for school choice versus equitable funding for public schools. Cultural critics are always working to nudge, influence, or even transform their cultures (in culturally tuned ways).

Just as individuals can work to change or resist their cultures, so too can groups or collectives. From everyday forms of activism to large-scale protests to historic revolutions, people around the world band together through solidarity and collective action (e.g., Becker, 2012; Craig et al., 2020; Power, 2020; Stroebe et al., 2015). For example, in the wake of Me Too, more women felt emboldened to call out men’s behaviors that undermined women’s agency. Terms like “mansplaining” and “manspreading” became part of the lexicon, and confronting behaviors like these in everyday interactions became more normative (Sunstein, 2019). Because those with less power, status, or resources are usually disadvantaged by the status quo, they can be important catalysts for change (see Principle 5).

Another important idea is that cultures are not neutral systems or processes that function independently of time and space. Just as computational algorithms can transmit and perpetuate the biases of their data inputs or human creators, so too can cultures (e.g., Adams & Estrada-Villalta, 2017; Salter et al., 2018; Zou & Schiebinger, 2018). They are laden with human meanings and have powerful assumptions, defaults, and biases built into their designs (see Principles 2 and 4). The more people participate in and uphold a culture, the more its assumptions, defaults, and biases are reinforced, replicated, and spread. ...

[Bhaskar] describes curation as 'using acts of selection and arrangement (but also refining, reducing, displaying, simplifying, presenting and explaining) to add value.

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He sees expert selection as at the start of good curation and quotes from Maria Popova, curator of the highly thought of 'Brain Pickings': "The art of curation isn't about the individual pieces of content, but about how these pieces fit together, what story they tell by being placed next to each other, and what statement the context they create makes about the culture and the world at large. This is, she argues, a process of 'pattern recognition'. Seeing how things fit together, understanding connections (which multiply in a networked environment), but then also, crucially, creating new ones by recombining them, is a massive part of curation."

To curate something is a curious act. Bring two items together, and you’ve made a collection. You’ve just curated. One of the OED definitions for curation is “The selection of items for a collection: The selection of items, such as documents, music, or internet content, for inclusion in a collection or on a website.” This could range from the mundane task of curating clothes for an outfit (a collection) to the sophisticated act of curating cultural artifacts for an exhibition. There are even less obvious, or at least, less intentional acts of curation, like selecting items for an Amazon shopping cart. Yet that would also qualify as curation.

When you curate, and create a collection of objects, you are strengthening their associative connection by virtue of placing them in the same collection. By bringing together seemingly disparate items into a collection, the curator establishes connections and suggests shared meanings or qualities among the included elements. These connections, when sufficiently repeated and iterated upon, can be regarded as a kind of style, aesthetic, or “core.” Curation and repetition are essential processes to the creation of robust associative networks. A robust associative network can be thought of as a coherent and meaningful collection of objects and relationships. The collection may be abstracted away from the original objects that created the “core” or “ethos,” or even become prototypical (as is the hallmark of AI images) as to distill away the variance in the constitutive collections.

This process of associative meaning-making through curation can be seen in various cultural domains, from fashion to art to literature. The rise of “cottagecore” as an aesthetic and lifestyle trend, for instance, can be traced back to the curation of certain images, clothing styles, and ideas on social media platforms like Tumblr and Instagram. By consistently grouping together elements that evoked a romanticized, rural ideal, these curated collections helped to establish and reinforce the associative networks that define the cottagecore semioscape.

In other words, the act of curation itself is a significant one because it creates “semiotic landscapes” (semioscapes) by way of associative networks between items. The strength and durability of these associative networks may depend on factors like the coherence of the curated collection, the frequency with which the associations are reinforced, and the degree to which they resonate with broader cultural currents. Some curated collections may remain niche or short-lived, while others may evolve into enduring cultural categories.

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Networks are curatorial structures. For instance, who you follow on social media is a curatorial decision: you’re making a collection. But to “follow” on social media is merely a model of a social relation that exists in the very real, social world that is both algorithmically mediated and not. The “social layer” of the sociosemioscape exists online and off: the conversations outside the gallery, the discourse on telegram channels, and so on are networks by which semiotic objects travel and get manipulated, interpreted and metabolized. It’s a swirling, churning process by which discourse creates and iterates on symbols and meaning.