To better understand how individuals, communities, and societies are navigating our rapidly changing world, we need to bring all our scientific tools for studying culture and evolution to the same table. We must unite in our scholarly efforts to explain the most important causes and consequences of cultural evolution, and we must leverage this foundational knowledge to create effective policies for enhancing social resilience and well-being in an ever-changing cultural landscape. In short, we need a more integrated approach to studying the intersections of culture and evolution.
Our launching of the new journal Culture and Evolution addresses this critical need. We intend to publish manuscripts from across the cultural and evolutionary sciences, with a particular emphasis on theoretical or empirical papers that advance our understanding of culture and its connections with biological evolution. Many scholarly disciplines must take part in this endeavour. The journal will seek papers from the fields of cross-cultural psychology, cultural evolution, cultural phylogenetics, dual-inheritance theory, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary sociology, human behavioural ecology, human ethology, and international public health.
Although limited scholarly overlap exists across these disciplines, there is a trend for scholars to silo within one of these approaches. Each of these disciplines has its own intellectual history, its own favoured theories and methodologies, and its own journals and professional organisations. Because of this, some scholars fail to engage with the best theories and investigative tools that would allow them to properly answer the questions they should be asking. This new journal, Culture and Evolution, intends to change that by creating a venue in which cultural and evolutionary scholars across all disciplines help to inform and inspire one another. Our hope is that armed with an increasingly interdisciplinary framework, contributors and readers of this journal will reconcile historically disparate approaches and bring profound levels of consilience to the cultural and evolutionary sciences.
