# Cultural Transmission **Domain:** Cultural Evolution / Learning / Inheritance **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Cultural transmission** is the movement and reconstruction of learned information, practices, norms and skills among people and across generations. ## Architecture Transmission may be vertical from parents, horizontal among peers or oblique from members of an older generation who are not parents. Unlike genetic inheritance, cultural information can spread rapidly, transform during acquisition and move across unrelated populations. [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] uses cultural transmission to connect evolutionary theory with technical institutions. Universities, code repositories, standards and machine-learning systems are transmission channels that alter which cognitive patterns persist. ## Continuity Context Cultural inheritance can preserve a person's effects without preserving that person. A student, model or archive may carry style, concepts and decisions forward while remaining a descendant rather than the same consciousness. ## Key Insight **Information can participate in descent outside the germline, but inherited influence is not identical to personal survival.** ## Sources / Provenance - Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, _Cultural Transmission and Evolution_, 1981. - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Cultural Evolution”: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/ ## See Also [[wiki/Gene-Culture Coevolution|Gene-Culture Coevolution]], [[wiki/Cognitive Exteriorization|Cognitive Exteriorization]], [[wiki/Descent vs Derivation|Descent vs Derivation]], [[wiki/Reconstructed Person|Reconstructed Person]]