Table 1.

General characteristics of genetic and cultural evolution (adapted from [9, 12])

Evolution type/characteristics	Human genetic evolution (neo-Darwinian)	Human cultural evolution (Darwinian)
Evolutionary time	Usually thousands of years	Short time intervals, may occur within a few years
Variation	Random but some regions of DNA are more susceptible to mutation than others	Can be random or voluntarily guided by learning rules
Competition	Differential fitness of different alleles	Differential fitness of different cultural traits
Heredity	Parental Information storage structure (genotype) is transmitted	Parental or non-parental Information expression (equivalent to a phenotype) is transmitted