What do we have for scientific evidence and causal mechanisms of evolution in culture and human religious practice?
WILSON: Let’s begin with the evidence for biological evolution. What made Darwin’s theory compelling even at the time was a number of sources of evidence that together were convincing. Natural selection was more problematic. That took longer for people to accept. But the fact of evolution by descent was established by the geographic distribution of species on Earth, anatomical evidence, and so on. In some ways, evolution is a historical science like geology and astronomy — and these have a fine evidential basis even when you can’t do an experiment. That’s a prelude for describing the evidence for cultural evolution. Cultural evolution is a fact in that cultures change. Our species spread over the globe and colonized all regions of the earth. People obviously had to develop practices to survive in deserts and the Arctic with subsistence technologies — all while remaining a single species. Ecologically, our species is the equivalent of 100 mammalian species. That was done by culture! So
