One of the observations which provoked Darwin to propose his theory of “descent with modification” was the phenomenon that “like produces like.” Darwin named this phenomenon “inheritance” and wrote of characteristics being “transmitted” from one generation to the next, but confessed that he knew little about the mechanisms involved. With the Modern Synthesis (Huxley, Reference Huxley1942) “inheritance” became viewed as “genetic transmission” of characters, although Huxley argued strongly against what he called “the one-to-one or billiard-ball view of genetics” (p. 19) in which each trait in the offspring is assumed to reflect transmission of a single gene.

It is now known, of course, that genes are not literally “transmitted” from parent to offspring. In procreation, chromosomes are replicated by complex cellular machinery and then offspring self-assemble as those copies, shuffled in the process of recombination, become active in the equally complex cellular machinery of the egg cell. In other words, “genetic transmission” is a metaphor, and the actual molecular mechanisms that underlie “like produces like” are complex. In addition, as proponents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis point out, non-molecular mechanisms are also involved (Laland et al., Reference Laland, Uller, Feldman, Sterelny, Müller, Moczek and Odling-Smee2015).

One would expect, then, that when supporters of cultural evolution theory write of the “transmission” of knowledge and values from one generation to the next (or within generations) they too would intend this as a metaphor. After all, they consider cultural evolution to be a “Darwinian evolutionary process” (Mesoudi, Reference Mesoudi2016). The phenomena which provoke the authors of this article are tradition and innovation, but although they declare, like Darwin, that they wish to identify the “mechanisms through which these [phenomena] are expressed” in fact this identification moves no further than the claim that two distinct “stances” underlie them.

Do these stances actually serve as an explanation? The authors tell us they are not stances in Dennett's sense of a “strategy of interpreting behavior” (Dennett, Reference Dennett1971), though how they differ remains unclear. The stances seem to function simply as intermediaries between two types of perceived action and two types of imitation. The instrumental and ritual stances are invoked, we are told, by ritual and instrumental actions respectively, or by the ritual and instrumental components of an action. There seems some circularity here. Instrumental actions are characterized by features such as salient end goals, action resolvability, and instrumentality. Ritual actions are characterized by causal opacity, conventionality, and normative language. In the case of the former, low-fidelity copying is the appropriate response; that is to say, imitation with innovation. In the case of the latter, high-fidelity copying is appropriate. This “selectivity” in the “degree of copying fidelity” is necessary, we are told, to be an “efficient social learner.” All this leads the reader to suspect that the mechanism that is in fact offered to explain the two aspects of cultural evolution is the usual suspect, “social learning.” It is “copying” or “imitation” or “mimicry,” with either “low or high fidelity.” In short, transmission.

Is imitation not an adequate explanation? What is wrong with proposing that one-to-one copying is the mechanism of social learning and cultural transmission? Principally because, as with “genetic transmission,” it is only one part of a larger system. People do imitate each other, of course. But just as the replication – the copying – of genes requires a complex molecular apparatus, so too human imitation arises from a complex cognitive apparatus. Imitation does not stand alone. In Piagetian terms it is the primacy of accommodation within a larger process of equilibration. One might say that imitation functions as one component in a network of self-teaching, social focusing, and teaching-elicitation devices (Parker, Reference Parker1993). “One-to-one” imitation alone cannot serve as an explanatory mechanism for social learning, let alone for the evolution of culture.

Since the work of Piaget, developmental scientists have accepted that individual learning is a matter of active construction of knowledge structures, with stage-like qualitative transformations. But if individual learning is so complex can we expect social learning to be simply imitation? That seems implausible, at best. Anyone who has taught knows that when students simply copy or imitate what they hear, their learning is superficial. To define social learning as “Information acquisition through interaction with- and observation of other individuals and their products” is to revert again to the transmission metaphor, thinly disguised as “acquisition.”

The authors do promise to disclose the “cognitive underpinnings,” the “underlying cognitive architecture,” and the “distinctive motivations” of these two “modes of cultural transmission” (there it is again), and in particular “the level of deliberateness and domain-specificity” that is involved. However, bets on these particularities are hedged. The stances, we are told, may be innate or learned, automatic or deliberate, and domain-specific or general. It is also unclear whether they are cued by features of actions or are distinct ways of interpreting the same action.

Only two kinds of action exist in the barren world envisaged by bifocal stance theory: means-ends and affiliative actions. We would suggest that attention to the institutions, the institutional reality, in which all humans live would be helpful (Packer & Cole, Reference Packer, Cole, Nasir, Lee, Pea and McKinney de Royston2021). Every instrumental action is conducted within one or another institutional setting. And institutions involve ceremonies which can appear to be mere ritual but are in fact procedures which confer rank, status, or role on a person or object. A student receiving a doctorate, the blessing that makes water holy, the marriage of bride and groom; all are institutional procedures which involve causality that is constitutive rather than instrumental, in the sense that a new entity is constituted by the procedure.

Attention to institutions would also invite a more nuanced approach to normativity. Norms are defined in this article as “mutual agreements on how members of a group ought to conduct themselves in various social contexts.” But such an approach doesn't distinguish among promises, customs (we all bring a bottle to the party), role-obligations (teachers must evaluate students' work), and laws (drive on the left). Children understand institutions, and their normativity, in different ways at different ages, just as their understanding of instrumental causality develops.