The theoretical stance adopted in sociobiology and its successor evolutionary psychology that biological and cultural evolution co-evolve, a sort of Darwinian theory of culture, and termed a ‘feedback reciprocal relation’ by Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975). Accordingly, there is a direct co-evolutionary relationship between genes and culture such that changes in one can lead to changes in the other. An alternative view is that the relationship is indirect: biological and cultural evolution are interacting, but potentially independent, processes that result in human phenotypes evolving in the direction of states that maximise inclusive fitness. As a consequence, cultural evolution has the property of emergent novelty that cannot be reduced to the action of genes. It is important to point out that the term ‘co-evolution’ has another connotation in evolutionary biology.
See Biological evolution, Co-evolution, Cultural evolution, Cultural selection, Emergence, Evolutionary psychology, Gene, Genotype and phenotype, Inclusive fitness, Meme