The most elementary manifestation of cultural change is the technological evolution of material artefacts. This has many similarities to bioorganic evolution, but is worth exploring as a phenomenon in its own right. For example, memes are non-Mendelian: they diversify and are selectively reproduced like genes, but are not enduring, perfectly replicable, or particulate, and can recombine across distant lineages. Considered as design concepts they can also evolve virtually, independently of the artefacts they encode and through whose selection they survive. Although variant populations of artefacts and memes are highly diversified, they are not generated blindly. Since technological entities are produced by conscious human agency to meet human needs, their variation and selection are necessarily non-Weismannian and, in certain significant senses, Lamarckian. But this does not exclude the appearance of typical macroevolutionary phenomena, such as satisficing adaptation, coevolution, locked in meme complexes, diversification into niches, and punctuated equilibrium. Nevertheless, technological evolution differs fundamentally from bioorganic evolution because it is a social process, in which institutions are becoming increasingly important. Above all, it involves human thought, which permits the incorporation of experience from a remembered past – ‘learning’ – and a projected future – ‘imagination’ – into the virtual phases of the evolutionary process. Technological change is thus, indeed, a dynamic VSR (variation and selective retention) evolutionary process, but gains hybrid vigour from its mixed Darwinian and Lamarckian parentage.
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